by Jim Harold
15. My Roommate, Lizzie Borden
About a year ago, I had a boyfriend who was very into everything paranormal, just as I have always been. So for his birthday, I decided to take him to Lizzie Borden's Bed and Breakfast, which is located in Fall River, Massachusetts. We were really pumped up about going on this trip; very excited. We didn't know much about Lizzie Borden, but we thought it was going to be fun. So we got there, and as soon as we walked in, there was just kind of this really strange feeling, just a very heavy feeling overall.
The first thing they do there is take you on a tour of the house. They tell you the story about how Lizzie Borden supposedly killed her mother and father, and they tell you things that have happened to them in the hotel as well—and then they send you off to bed, of course.
A few things have happened to me with ghosts and spirits in the past, so I was a little bit nervous, and of course I bought all these gifts for my boyfriend that were, like, board games and things, so we wouldn't have to sleep that night. Right away, he started complaining about how tired he was. So I said, "Okay, we can go to bed, but here are the rules: You have to sleep with your back to me, we cannot turn off the lights, and I don't want you to go to sleep until you hear me snoring." So, we lay down to go to sleep, and of course, immediately I hear him snoring. So I was like, Great, I'm here all by myself now.
So I'm lying there, getting ready to sleep, when all of a sudden I feel something pick up my toes, lift my foot up, and then drop it. And I thought, Hmmm...that's kind of strange. All right, I know that I'm still awake, I know that the lights are on, I know that I'm under the covers, nothing could have grabbed my leg without me noticing. I'm just going to ignore it and try to go back to sleep. So I lie back down, and again a few minutes later, I feel something pick up my toes, lift up my foot, and drop it.
And I thought, Something is definitely, definitely going on here.
As soon as you walk into the place, there's just this feeling that something really, really bad had happened. We were so excited beforehand, but as soon as we walked in the door, we could tell something was going on.
We felt a spirit in the bathroom as well. We took our turns taking a shower, and we both came to the conclusion without saying anything to the other one that there was definitely kind of a...it felt as though somebody was staring at you the whole time. The feeling from the bathroom was a really heavy, kind of evil feeling, but the one in the bedroom picking up the foot, that was totally a playful, fun spirit.
One of the women there, the one who owns it, said that something had happened to her in that room as well; one day she had been fixing up the room for the next set of guests, and something went through her body and knocked her on the ground. That was actually the room where the murder of the mother had happened.
It was spooky, but since that experience, I've definitely been on the search for my next haunted bed and breakfast.
-Gwynne, New York
16. A Night Visitor
After some spooky experiences that my wife, Christina, had, my daughter started asking questions about ghosts and those kind of things. Just for fun, I decided at Halloween time to book us a trip on one of these little ghost tours they do downtown. A lot of cities do this.
There's a little town near us called Bisbee, in Arizona. It is a little mining town, and they have these ghost tours, as well as the Copper Queen hotel, which is pretty famous for being haunted. My stepdad, who has passed away, had stayed there years before, and had told us when we were younger that it was haunted. So I thought that would be a really fun tour to do around Halloween. Well, Halloween is crazy booked, so we couldn't get in, but we got in in November. We walked this huge loop around town, heard a bunch of ghost stories, and took lots of pictures—you know, it was real fun.
We had a nice day and got back to the room and settled down for the night. The day had been pretty uneventful, but we had a fun time. Christina woke me up about maybe 3:30 or 4 in the morning, and said, "Listen, do you hear that?" I woke up and mumbled, "Uh huh, yeah, I hear something." I really wanted to go back to sleep because it was 4 in the morning. And she said, "No, wait; listen. You have to listen to it." It sounded just like a rocking chair on a wooden floor, right by the bed. And this hotel, it's...I guess it's four floors. We stayed on the third floor, and all of our floors were carpeted. It's been renovated, but the hotel is from the 1890s, I guess. Anyway, it sounded just like a rocking chair on a wooden floor. We tried to figure out what it was after that, and we just couldn't.
Shortly after that, Christina had gotten up to go to the restroom, and I heard another sound. I was still actively listening. I heard a woman's voice, a whisper, go through one ear and out the other ear. I mean, Christina wasn't anywhere near me, and there was a woman's voice going around my head. When Christina came back to the bed, I could smell the scent of a perfume, like a rosewater perfume. Like an Old South perfume. Christina lay down in the bed and she asked, "Do you smell that?" Plus, she said she heard the same thing—a woman whispering in her ear! We didn't speak to each other for a minute, and we tried to settle ourselves down, and she lay down into bed and kind of did the little comfortable sigh, kind of a "mmm," and then immediately we both heard a man's voice right after that say "mmm"!
She looked at me, and I said, "That wasn't me." She sat up and looked at the end of our bed and said, "There's a man there, and he's taller than you." I got up, and she told me, "Go get the camera." It was on the other side of the room. I got out of bed and walked to the other side of the room. I stopped halfway to the camera, dead in my tracks. I felt this electrical feeling, like a shock going through my body, and I turned back to her and said, "Look at this." All of the hair all over my body was sticking straight up. And I was so excited. We weren't threatened at all, it was just...real. There was somebody else there. I couldn't see him. She kind of saw him. But we both experienced it, and it was really real.
By the time I got the camera, of course, there was nothing there. Later on, the next day, we tried to re-create everything—hear the voices, the smells, everything like that. We went to the next room, the next level, to see if those had wooden floors, and, of course, they didn't. They were plush carpeting, but both of us know what we heard.
The hotel keeps a ghost journal. We went down the next morning and read some things that had been experienced on the same floor, and even in the same room. Past guests had written the very same experience in the exact same room.
-Gordon, Arizona
17. Mom's Here Again
We think that my mother-in-law haunts the house, or at least comes back and visits periodically.
We see a lot of shadows and things while watching television. Nothing really direct; it's kind of out of the corner of your eye that things fall off the shelf, cabin doors will open, people will get touched...
Actually, it's happened to me a couple of times. Once, I was standing in the kitchen with my husband, and he was cooking something, and I screamed and jumped about four feet forward, and he gave me this look like I was absolutely crazy. And I said, "Someone just tucked in the tag on my shirt!" You know how the tag in your shirt comes out? He's like, "That's something my mom would do!"
We've never had anything threatening happen in the house, so it's all good.
The weirdest thing that's happened was this story: I was coming in the house and had my hands full of bags. To explain this properly I have to describe the layout of the house. There's kind of one of those bay alcove windows for the house and I'm coming up the driveway and I've got my hands full. I look up and it seems as though there's somebody standing in the window looking out. I do the nod-your-head, hey-I'm-coming-in thing, and I get to the door and I put my hand out to open the door and the doorknob turns. The door opens like somebody's opening it, and this is a hard door to open. I have trouble with it. Now, I'm not exactly the biggest person in the world, but you've got to really push the door to open it, and it opens like there's somebody behind it, pulling it open. And I look beh
ind the door, about to say, "Thanks for opening the door!" And, guess what? There's nobody behind the door.
My husband was in the back, in the bedroom, playing a computer game. But no one was behind the door. I shuffled down the hallway real fast with kind of a freaked-out walk, and I said, "The door just opened by itself."
My husband seems okay with it. He'll acknowledge that he sees and hears things, but as far as exactly what he's heard I'm not entirely sure. The other people in the house...a couple people really seem to notice it, but in general it's just me, my husband, and my father-in-law who notice things. I think we pay attention to that, because we're weird. We're the type of people to stay up all night on Halloween and watch the ghost-hunter specials every year.
-Dora, Virginia
18. The Elevator Man
This happened in about 2000 or 2001, where I work. Me and my coworker had gone to the break room, and when you leave the break room, you have to go down a long hallway to get to the elevator. As we were walking to the elevator, the doors opened and we saw a man in a gray suit with sandy blond hair walking onto the elevator. One thing that puzzled me is that when you go through elevator doors, typically the sensors cause the doors to open up when someone is going through. In this case, they just kept closing. We walked up just a couple seconds later and hit the button, thinking we'd have to wait for another elevator. Well, lo and behold, the same elevator opened up quickly. We both walked into the elevator, which was empty, and the door closed. We both looked at each other quizzically. My coworker asked, "Didn't a man just walk in here?" and I said, "I was thinking the same thing." Needless to say, as soon as we got to our floor and the doors opened, we got out quickly.
I don't know of a lot of activity in the building, but in our suite we've had other coworkers say that when no one was in the office, you could hear somebody typing. Or that they saw something on their screen that looked like someone walking behind them—little things of that nature.
-Velma, Texas
19. Grandma's Got More Company
My grandmother's house has been in our family for many years, dating back to the 1920s. First my mother's family owned it and then they ended up selling it to the family that would be her cousin's family eventually. So it all kind of stayed in the family. My grandmother—my dad's mother—would always experience different paranormal activity in the house. She would be downstairs in the living room and hear someone walking across the large room above her and it would sound like a man who had a cane. She talked to my mother's family and they said, "Oh yes, that was Uncle Harry; he died in that room and he did have a cane." They speculated that perhaps that was Uncle Harry who had come back to walk around, and look out the window, and so forth.
My grandmother would often see her brother sitting in the kitchen chair, and the only thing was that her brother had died about 20 years prior. She would turn and feel someone in the room with her and there he'd be. She also experienced this in her car when she was driving.
My grandmother was not even an eccentric woman, let alone crazy. She was a very level-headed kind of person, and she just seemed to think that for some reason or another she was very open to those who had gone before coming back and visiting her.
Her daughter, my aunt, also saw a figure standing in the kitchen. We were all there for an evening, I remember, when I was 7 or 8 years old, for a family dinner. My aunt said, "Look over there in the corner! There's a woman standing there with a veil!" No one could see it but my aunt, and she's not a very eccentric person, either. Then we spoke to my mother's family later about that and I guess the woman my aunt described was Uncle Harry's wife who had passed away in that house as well.
My grandmother was never frightened. In fact, she was very disappointed after talking to a person who was a very devout Catholic—and, you know, we're a family of faith too, but this person seemed to say, "You know, you really want to stop this. Why don't you sprinkle some holy water in your house?" And my grandmother did and she said she never had another experience after that. So she was very disappointed. The holy water was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing with peer pressure and what have you, but she said the phenomena never really scared her and she liked seeing people.
I could never understand why, if these were genuinely kind spirits and indeed the relatives of the people whom she loved, why they were affected by holy water. That didn't really make any sense to me; if they were really just angels or what have you who had gone and just wanted to come back and say hi, why would they be afraid of holy water? Why would that have stopped it?
My grandmother has passed on and we haven't seen her. One time right after my other grandmother died, we messed around with a Ouija board. My brother was about 12 and I was about 14, and we played with it in her room. It really moved, and we just freaked out so badly. I'm definitely a person who is fast, but I've never run so fast in my life. We ran out to the backyard and my brother climbed up on the fence between our backyard and the school. We never messed with that stuff again because it's just not right.
-Ingrid, Pennsylvania
20. One Messed-Up House
I moved into this house when I was about 7. It was roughly 1983–84. We lived there for about seven years, and we had all kinds of odd happenings. It was a grand house, built in the 1940–1950 time range. At the time, it was a very upscale neighborhood—not so much now, but it was then.
The first thing that happened had to do with the doorbell. There were different chimes for the different doors; the front door had a very elaborate chime. There were different times, especially in the evening, when the chimes would just ring and ring and ring and we'd have to go outside and literally disconnect the wires in order to stop them. You could just look at the door itself or the button and see that it had been physically jammed in and you'd have to dislodge it.
The way that the neighborhood was set up, we did have neighbors, but there was a good distance in between each of you. So, it wasn't as though someone could push it and then step behind a bush or something; it was obviously happening on its own.
In addition to the doorbell, probably the next thing that I can really remember is a phenomenon on the stairs. It was an older home and the stairs were by the front door right in the foyer, and they take you upstairs to the children's bedrooms. The stairs were older, so of course, when you stepped on them, they would creak. What would happen was, say you were on the stairs and you walked up five or six of them. Then at the bottom of the stairs you could feel the vibration of the stairs themselves and you could hear a sound as if someone had just started walking up them behind you. You would get the feeling as if you could turn around and there would be somebody there.
I was young while in this house and I became very angry when this would happen. I would turn around and swat the air behind me as if to shoo it away. Sometimes it would kind of ease up and sometimes it wouldn't, but it made me feel better!
And then there was the couch. We sold that couch last year actually, but we'd had it all these years. The couch was in the formal living room, which was right off the foyer to the left when you came in. That was the room we used for Christmas and that was pretty much it; that was where the expensive furniture and the antiques were. If my mom caught you in that room you were in big trouble! Nobody went in that room. I think I probably sat on that couch maybe 14 times in my life.
We had a portrait of my great-great-great grandfather who was a captain in the Civil War, and it was centered above the couch. Every night there would be a shadow on the couch. It sat in the center of this couch and it had a human shape. It sat there every single night for seven years. And it literally wore a place into the couch. There was a perfect half-moon shape indented in this couch, as if someone had been sitting there night after night watching television. My mother would get on topics of spooky things with people and would show them the couch. It was bizarre!
Another thing that happened in the house concerned the bed in my room. I'm a very, very, very light sleeper, whi
ch really pays off when you have a toddler! You don't sleep through anything! I think I was probably 9 or 10 at the time, and I had twin beds in my room at the very top of the stairs. The stairs go up from the foyer and they turn to the left at the landing and go up, and my room was at the very top of that. One night, I was sleeping with my nightlight on and my door open as always, and I felt my bed raise up, as if someone was sitting on my bed, like when your mother comes in to check on you. She checks on you and she may rub your forehead, and then when she stands up the bed lifts. So I rolled over and said, "Momma?" And there was nobody there.
I was not a girlie-girl. I was very much a tomboy, but my mother had very girlie-girl comforters, which were very fluffy and lacy and flowery. On this comforter there was an imprint, a depression, where someone had sat. I was very certain that she had been in there. So I sat up, and I watched the stairs to see if maybe she had gone around the corner to my restroom or to my brother's room, and I sat there for probably 15 minutes just watching, and, of course, she never did show up. I realized that she was never there. But someone had come into my room.
I believe a single family owned the home before us; I think it was a one-owner home, but I can't swear to that. I heard that the family before us had a mother who was an alcoholic, and she was a very angry alcoholic when she drank. So I thought maybe that was, as I look at it now, a motherly thing to do, to sit down on the bed and check on me.
I think the most startling thing that happened that got everybody's attention was that we had a couple of maids at one time who would come in during the day while my parents were working and we were at school. We would come home and they'd watch after us for a couple of hours until my parents came home. It was two sisters. (At one point it had been just one of the sisters, but she was uncomfortable working there by herself for whatever reason, so her sister came and worked with her.)
