True Ghost Stories: Jim Harold's Campfire 2

by Jim Harold

  That was just the start, it went on from there. One of the things that I had used for decoration in the cellar was an old telephone that had been in a bar in the 1930’s. It was one of these telephones where you could press the button and signal people in another room to come and get some drinks or something like that. I just put it on the wall. It wasn’t connected. In fact, I don’t think it ever worked.

  I had gone into the Navy and was away from home for a year at a time. One day, when I was in the Atlantic in 1969, my mother went down to the cellar. She used to sit there, listen to the radio and just relax. It was away from the hubbub of the rest of the house. So, she was down there relaxing and suddenly she heard the phone ringing, the one that was hanging on the wall! Since I was an electrician in the service, she thought that I had played some trick to have it go off at some certain time since it rang while she was down there. Then, she was afraid that it was something from the beyond, I guess, once she realized there weren’t any wires hooked up. She picked it up, put the speaker to her ear, and there was silence. She was afraid that it was going to be me, calling to say there was an accident or something, and I was calling to say goodbye. She told me about it the next time I came home, and I said, “No, that’s impossible. It’s not hooked up.” I took it off the wall and showed her; there were no wires connected, there was no battery, nothing. I have no clue how that thing rang. Weird things happened there, and not just in the cellar.

  In the same house, there was a couple who lived on the second floor. The woman came down one night and said to my mother, “Look, I’ve got a problem. It’s very late at night, and your husband is upstairs on the third floor doing renovations, and it’s 1 am. I’d like you to please talk to him, tell him to stop. We’re trying to sleep.” My mother said, “He’s not up there. He’s at work.” My father worked shift work and wasn’t home. This woman offered, “Well, you can come up and hear. There’s someone up there sawing wood and hammering.” My mother followed her up to the second floor, and sure enough, they both could hear hammering, sawing and somebody walking around on the third floor. She said to the woman, “I’ve got to call the police. There’s someone who has broken in.”

  She called the police, and after they came they wanted to know if there was another exit to the apartment? My mother said, “Yes, the fire escape.” One cop said, “I’m going to go out back and I’m going to watch the fire escape,” and the other one said, “Give me the keys. I’m going in the room.” As soon as he stepped onto the third floor hallway, the sounds stopped. He opened the door and he went inside, put the lights on, walked around with his gun out. No one was there. No one had come down the fire escape.

  They heard the sounds, but you’ve got to realize, this was the Jersey City police. They just shrugged their shoulders and said, “Nothing there. Goodbye,” and they left. It was quiet for the rest of the night. Eventually, we sold the house. My mother made me swear upon my deathbed that I would never tell the new owners anything about the house. They bought it and they were very, very, nice people. The new owners invited myself and my nephew back to the house one time. I asked them if they had ever seen anything in the house that was unusual. They said, “Oh, you mean the man that comes around?” They had all seen many of the same things that we had, and there was a break in the time between when we were there and they came. They never heard any of the stories from us. After we sold the house, we had a medium come in there.

  My ex-wife had a friend who was a medium, sort of a new medium. She had some interesting revelations about the place. She came out to the house with us, and even as we walked up, she said, “I can feel that there’s something there.” She pointed out the house from the street. We didn’t tell her anything about it, other than we wanted her to walk through it. We came in, an she asked a number of questions to the people that were living there, just about themselves, so she could see if there was any influence that they were having on it. So we walked up in the hallways, and she started to go up the stairs to the second floor. She stopped, froze, and she said, “I can’t go up to the third floor. Something is up there that is not good.” She said, “I will not go up there.”

  She went into the second floor and the bathroom. She said very emphatically, “Someone died in this room. I get the sense there’s someone lying on the floor dying.” So we think maybe that’s where it came from.

  -Tom, Eastern United States

  23. Dark Witchcraft Comes Home to Roost

  I had moved out of my childhood home and returned once I was older. I never had any scary experiences there as a child but I sure did the second time around after me and my older brother decided to move back. I was around 19, and my boyfriend who moved in with me was really into Brujeria which is Mexican witchcraft. A lot of weird stuff started happening. I was having really vivid dreams where I would wake up and be choking, and they always involved him. At one point, I woke up and he was standing over me and said, “You were talking in two different voices.” I was really scared and so was he.

  There was one point where I knew he’d practiced Brujeria in my house without my permission, and overnight, an infestation of flies swooped down into the house like in The Amityville Horror. It was really scary, because I was just standing in the middle of my living room, and there were flies everywhere. I could hear the collective buzz. It was really insane, and it took about three days to get rid of all of them. We looked everywhere. We thought maybe it was a dead animal or something, but the amount of flies that appeared just overnight was really scary.

  Eventually my boyfriend moved out, and after he left I was cleaning out the large walk-in closet. My friend, who’s 6 feet tall, was there and he could see above the top shelf. He asked, “Hey, Jenny, did you know that you have owl wings in the closet?” I said, “What are you talking about?” It turned out there were ripped-off owl wings on the top of my closet. It really, really scared me.

  The wings looked like they were cut off, very jagged. I thought maybe it was taxidermy or something but I grew up with my grandma there and she didn’t have any taxidermy. She was the traditional Mexican grandmother, very devout, who loved the Virgin Mary and Jesus. I knew my boyfriend was kind of into that sort of thing, but I never thought that he would do that at my house. Shortly after this, I moved out, and weird stuff stopped happening.

  During the time I was with him I was a security guard overnight, and I would see shadows. Shadow people, I guess you would say. It was just a really intense, crazy relationship, and I’m glad I’m not in it anymore. It was scary.

  I think it was just stuff following him. At the time, I was learning to tattoo, and I had inked some symbols on him. Of course, afterward I find out that these symbols mean certain things, one of them signifying that you could talk to the dead or that they search you out to talk to you.

  I was really upset. Of course, it sounds really superstitious, and it’s coming from the Hispanic culture and everything, but I believed it. That’s what I grew up with.

  The good news is that everything is back to normal now but it was very spooky.

  -Jennifer, Texas

  24. All The News that's Fit to Haunt

  This story happened in my college journalism lab at Kilgore College in Texas. There were three separate events that took place with three different people, and none of us knew about the other events because we never said anything to each other until the very end of school. It was kind of strange.

  Now, the journalism lab also doubled as a yearbook lab. The first event which happened in the summer didn’t involve me, and like I said, none of us knew any of these other events took place. So everything happened independently. This is an old building and they didn’t run the air conditioner in the summer. Two girls, Rachel and Jennifer, who worked on the newspaper, also doubled on the yearbook staff. They were in the lab one afternoon, and it was hot. They had the door to the lab propped open while they were using the computers. One of them was facing the door, and one had the door to her immediate left.
It’s one of those old style doors that you used to see in doctors’ offices that had the big glass window, where you can see who’s on the other side.

  They’re working away, and all of a sudden the door closed. They didn’t think anything about it. They said, “Oh, well, it’s an old building; the door just kind of slid shut.” So they went back over and they opened it up. This time they propped a brick in front of it. They sat back down and they started working, and the door slid shut again. They thought somebody was messing with them, but they couldn’t see anybody on the other side. So they went out in the hall, did a check; there was no one else in the building. They opened the door back up, put the brick in front of it, and at about this time, the door slid closed again. They said, “Well, whatever. The door’s just being persnickety.”

  Rachel looked up at the door after it’s closed this last time. This is one of those doors that has a deadbolt on the inside and you lock or unlock it with a key from the outside. Rachel said, “Oh my God, Jennifer, the door is locking.” The deadbolt was twisting and locking closed itself. They could see through the other side of the door, and there was no one on the other side. Well, it spooked the two of them; they jumped up, they couldn’t get the door to unbolt. No matter physically how hard they tried, the door would not unbolt. They were starting to panic, they went to the phones, got ready to call somebody, and the door unlocked. Needless to say, they left the building. They didn’t want anybody to think they were crazy, so they didn’t say anything.

  A couple of months later came part two of the story. I was working the late-night shift at the newspaper with some of my buddies. There were about four guys in there. It’s about 2 am and we had a 24-hour burger joint nearby, my buddies asked, “We’re going to go get a hamburger; do you want anything?” I said, “No, I’m going to stay here and finish working on this edition of the paper.” That response sounded like something from a movie. They left.

  Anyhow, I was sitting there alone facing the computer, and working in a very well lit room.

  If you can picture this lab, there’s the door, there’s a pegboard, which really dates the journalism aspect of it, there are rolls of tape, rulers and all kinds of stuff hanging off of pegs.

  There was also the light table, it ran the rest of the length of the room, and it had a light switch on the side of it. Up, on; down, off. Well, it’s on, and I’m sitting there working, and all of a sudden the worst feeling – it’s almost indescribable – fear, dread, terror, every kind of ill feeling you can imagine, just washed over me. Now, I’m a good-sized guy, and this was back in my early 20’s. At that age, you think you’re pretty much bulletproof. All of a sudden, I just said, “I’ve got to get out of here. I don’t know what’s wrong. I’ve got to get out of here.” I get up, I turn the computer off, walk to the door, turn the light off in the room, and I turn the light table off. Just as I’m getting ready to leave, all the tape and rulers that are on these long pegs come off the pegboard, and the light table turns on by itself. I hit the bricks. I was out of that room really fast.

  Part three happened at the end of the year. The journalism lab included both a lab and classroom. There was a lab on one side with an internal doorway to the classroom portion. We were having a production meeting, all sitting in the lab, and we were waiting on the school newspaper’s advertising director, Barbara, to come. Her office was inside the classroom itself.

  Our teacher was sitting in such a manner in the lab that she was looking straight into the classroom through the classroom doorway. She sees a woman come in the door and go into the advertising director’s office. She thought to herself, “Well, Barbara’s here. We’ll get started here in just a minute.” A minute goes by. No Barbara. Another minute goes by. No Barbara. Two, three more minutes go by. The teacher asks, “Well, what’s going on? We’re waiting.” She gets up, she goes in the other room, and the door’s still locked; nobody has exited, and the advertising director’s office is still locked. As our teacher is walking back into the lab from the classroom, Barbara came in the classroom door. So nobody knows who or what our teacher saw walk through the door and into the classroom. She likes to say she thought it was one of the students. I’m not so sure.

  -Jay, Texas

  25. The Haunted Cottage No. 2

  In addition to my last story, we also lived in this 19th-century cottage where strange things happened.

  I guess you could call it a Gaelic ghost. This cottage was located by a large quarry and built for the senior managers. It was another nice, cozy house.

  This revolves around three times when I was awoken. The first time was by someone shouting “No, no, NO!” at the top of their voice. Honestly, it sounded like they were standing next to me. It was so dramatic and so loud that the first “No” woke me up, during the second “no” I was coming to, and at the third “no” I was absolutely wide awake. I could not work out where on earth it was coming from. I thought someone was being attacked outside the house. I looked out to the little lane nearby, and there was nobody around.

  A few weeks later, I woke up and somebody shouted something that sounded like, “Are you there yet?” Still, I knew that wasn’t it. I interpreted it as “Ash-a-na-var-kin” or something weird. I just couldn’t quite make out what they’d said. There were no words that I could fit into it that made sense. So, I put it down to sheer weirdness.

  About a month later, an Irish friend of mine was staying at the house with us, and she went up to the bathroom. She came back downstairs, and said, “Somebody just shouted in Gaelic at me in the bathroom.” I asked, “Okay, what did they say?” And she said, “Ash-ne-kar-ya,” which apparently means “Why are you crying?” in Gaelic. We thought that was quite strange.

  Again, more weird things happened. We had a ghost dog in the bedroom. I woke up in the middle of the night and my husband was saying, “There there, there there.” I said to him, “What on earth are you doing?” He said, “I’m telling the dog to settle down.” I reminded him that we didn’t have a dog. He said, “Okay, what’s breathing on my hand then?” I asked him if he wanted me to look? He said, “No, I’m putting my hand inside the comforter. I’m not going to look.” That was more strangeness.

  We ended up splitting up and I moved out, but we stayed fairly close friends. We were chatting about six months later, and he said, “You know what, another weird thing that happened in the house. I was in bed and I woke up, completely startled, and when I opened my eyes there were two people in the bedroom with me. There was a man and a woman. The man had a black hat and suit on. The woman had long sleeves and a fairly shapeless skirt on. The man was looking out the window and the woman was standing at the bottom of the bed staring at me.”

  I asked him what in the world did he do. He said, “I shut my eyes and hid under the bedclothes. About five minutes later I looked out again, and they were still there. So I shut my eyes and went back to sleep.” That was the one and only time. He’s never seen them since.

  I think part of the reason these things were happening is that I’ve got a very fey Irish mother and it was quite normal for us to come home from school and for her to say things like, “Saw your grandma in the mirror today. Must give her a ring.” Then, we’d find out that Grandma had been taken in hospital.

  “Saw Jeanie around the corner today. Must ring Derek, her husband, and just check how he’s going on,” she’d say. Jeanie would’ve been dead for something like three years. We grew up with this mother who seemed to chat all the time to people that weren’t there. So, I don’t look for these sorts of things, but I don’t reject them.

  -Fiona, United Kingdom

  26. The Haunted Vet Clinic

  I’ve worked at this veterinary clinic for about 10 years now. We’ve seen both human and animal apparitions there. The first one showed up while my friend Heidi and I were doing some work on the computer. We looked down the hallway, and we both saw this little boy peek his head around the corner from one of the exam rooms. We both kind of looked at ea
ch other and said, “Did you see that?” My friend said, “Yes,” So we both went up and looked around, just to make sure it wasn’t a little kid who had tried to come back and see what was going on with their pet. Well, there was no one there. Plus, we had no clients in there at the time.

  We found out later that the building, which has been there for a while, was actually an ice cream stand back in the 1960’s before it was a veterinary hospital. We didn’t know maybe if it could’ve been related to that. This experience was really quick, but really vivid. We saw him quite clearly, and it was actually both of us who saw him. It wasn’t just one person. So we found it very unusual.

  In terms of his clothes, I couldn’t really notice. I just remember seeing a blue shirt, but I couldn’t tell you if the cut was more modern or if it was back from the 1960s or not. I just remember seeing a young boy with blond hair peeking his head around the corner.

  That vision was not the only one. Several years before I started working there, one of the technicians unfortunately committed suicide. She was very troubled and had some issues. Shortly after I started working there, I saw this woman with blond hair standing in the doorway, again, just very briefly. I could see short blond curly hair, a scrub top and jeans -- like she was at work. I didn’t know about her until I asked my friend Heidi, “Have you ever seen anyone here before like that?” Then she told me about the woman and what had transpired.

  I saw her several times, standing in different parts of the clinic. It turned out she used to go out in our back area to smoke a cigarette occasionally. I saw her several times out there. Sometimes I would see her with blond hair, and others with black. I found out that she was originally a blond, but would dye her hair darker when she was going through a bit of a tough time. The last few times I saw her, she was blond, so I like to think that maybe she was feeling better and lightening up a little bit.