Red Eye, Oakhurst Cemetery

I haven't been out at the cemetery at night in years.  Not since one night, several years ago, when I was out there walking after dark.  I saw something moving in front of me, just some weird, dark shape.  I took out my camera and took a couple of pictures.  When I looked at the pictures on the camera's screen, I saw a blood-red eye just looking at me!  I headed home, and downloaded the pictures, but I kept them on my camera for a while.  Every time that I'd show them to someone, they'd say "dude, you gotta get those pictures off of your camera!"
I did go back at night, once.  I volunteer for the Sheriff's department, and they had me out there video taping one night.  I was out there for half and hour, but didn't see anything.

Commentary:  Just this evening, I walked into the mini-mart across the street from my hotel, and the fellow working there told me the above story.  I had my camera bag, and we had a brief conversation about photography, and I told him that I had been up at the cemetery getting some night time shots of the chapel, when he volunteered his tale.

I have no idea whether he was just trying to tell a tall tale to a tourist (Oakhurst bills itself as the "Gateway to Yosemite" and the town is full of tourisists going to or from Yosemite throughout the year), or if he genuinely had a weird experience.  However, I enjoyed the fact that, for a bit of a change, I was once again being told a ghost story, rather than having to hunt down and read it.

Once I am at a more reliable internet connection, I'll upload some of the photos I took at the chapel.

Sources:  Personal Account

Ghosts of Howard Hughes, a Small Boy, and the Playa Vista Project

One of my subordinates was an osteologist* on the Playa Vista project (see commentary below for description of the project).  Her job was to excavate and process human remains excavated from burials that were to be otherwise destroyed by the construction of a new planned community.  Once the human remains were removed from the ground, they were taken to a building that was once one of Howard Hughes' industrial facilities where they were catalogued and prepared for further analysis, repatriation, or curation, depending on the particular materials in question.

While working in the field lab, my minion (I prefer the word "minion" to "subordinate") and her coworkers began to experience some strange things.  They would see shadows moving in unoccupied rooms or between stacks of boxes; they would see something colored bright white moving along just at the corner of their vision; and they began to hear what sounded like the footprints of a child.

After a time, they began to hear noises, which at first were simply odd, indistinguishable sounds, but eventually became voices.  On more than one occasion, one of the archaeologists working int he lab said that she heard someone whisper her name into her ear.

My minion reports that after the sound of the child's footprints began at the lab, she also began hearing them at her home.  One morning, she woke up and saw the child, a little caucasian boy who looked like something from the 1950s, standing in her room.  Others working on the project reported the same thing.

For reasons that she was never quite clear on, she and the other workers came to the conclusion that the white shape seen moving in the lab was another spirit, specifically the ghost of Howard Hughes.  As far as she knows, people on the project continue to see it.




*An osteologist is an anthropologist who specializes in dealing with human bone.  On projects like this one, they often are brought in to study the remains taken out of burials.

Commentary:  First off, let me say that I am happy that this is not a typical "haunted Indian Burial ground" story.  The entire trope is rooted in racism and is insulting to Native Americans, as it essentially says lays at the feet of their ancestors every stupid thing that someone is too lazy to explain about their home.  That being said, even though the ghosts aren't Native American, these stories wouldn't exist without the excavations being performed at Playa Vista, so I would like to explain a bit about what is going on there.

The Playa Vista project is something of a textbook case of what can go wrong when Native Americans and land developers clash.

In 2003, construction of a huge mixed-use community called Playa Vista began along the Ballona Wetlands in Los Angeles County, California.  Cultural resources studies, including archaeology, had been performed prior to construction, and plans put into place for treatment of any archaeological resources encountered during construction.  This is all on the up-and-up, and everything appears to have followed the usual path from planning to environmental studies to development.

But then something went wrong.  It had been anticipated that a few burials might be found during construction, but hundreds were found.  The Native Americans who had participated in the initial studies and consultations, as well as others who had not (some claim that they were excluded intentionally, though I can find no evidence to confirm or deny such claims) demanded that plans be changed to account for the number of bodies found.  The developers refused, and continued on with the project.  Archaeologists tasked with excavating burials and seeing to it that they were properly treated got caught in the middle (with some archaeologists choosing sides and, frankly, making matters worse).  It is possible that the matter could have been resolved if the developers had been willing to redesign a portion of the project to avoid burials, or if enough bad blood had not been developed to allow for further consultation rather than simply the excavation of more burials, but this was not to be.  The project has now stretched on for eight years, and emotions continue to run high on all sides.

This Playa Vista project has devoured a huge amount of money in the excavation, study, and treatment of Native American remains.  I am one of the few archaeologists I know who has worked for more than a year in southern California who has not been sucked into the project, a fact for which I am very grateful.

So, it is in this pressure-cooker situation in which the archaeologists were working on this project, and a field lab for processing archaeological materials was set up in a building that used to be used by famous aircraft magnate/nutjob Howard Hughes.  Under the conditions, it is fair to ask whether the people who reported strange events were really experiencing them, or were simply dealing with a high-pressure situation while dealing with human remains in a building that has been owned by one of history's great creepy guys.

Still, I like the fact that the ghost story that came out of the excavation of Native American burials deal with a white industrialist and some white kid.  That amuses me.


Sources:  Personal Account, NPR News, Los Angeles Times, New York Times

A Haunted House in North Dakota

A co-worker of mine told me about a woman who he used to work with had the following experience during her childhood in North Dakota:

Every night, as she was in bed, she would hear whispers, as if they were trying to talk with her. The voices seemed to be trying to get her attention as she was trying to go to sleep. She was never able to quite make out what they were saying, but they were unmistakably human voices.

In this house, objects would also turn up missing only to appear again later. For example, her mother had bought her a pair of shoes for a dance recital, and one of the shoes went missing before the recital. She grabbed an old pair of shoes and left the new shoe in her room. On returning home from the recital, both of the shoes were sitting next to each other in the living room. On another occasion, a sweater went missing, and she went to the laundry room to look for it. On returning upstairs, she found the sweater folded in her drawer.

She was constantly afraid, but never got the impression that the force was evil or malicious. It just seemed to want her attention.

Commentary: Okay, I love these sorts of accounts. After he told me about his friend's experience, my co-worker asked what I thought. I explained that her experiences were very much classic "haunted house" experiences - they were eerie, but there was no clear "story" to them, they were just things that happened. Importantly, none of the events seem designed to creep out or frighten the story's audience, which makes them even scarier.

In his book Supersense, psychologist Bruce Hood describes elements that make religious stories memorable. Drawing from the Bible, he points to stories such as Jesus turning water into wine or feeding the hungry with a small amount of fish and bread. In each case, he points to the fact that the setting of the stories is mundane, and the miracle, while important, is small and easily understood by the reader, and importantly falls close-enough to "the possible" that it doesn't strain the credulity of someone hearing the story. In this way, he argues, these religious stories make their point, and are easily remembered and pondered by the audience, leading them to be particularly moving and important.

I think something similar may be at work in ghost stories such as this one. The story takes place in the most mundane of places - someone's home - and the symptoms of the haunting are not the high-pyrotechnics of many a Hollywood ghost tale, but rather are events that all of us can relate to and understand. Importantly, the symptoms of the haunting, while alleged to be un-natural, fall close enough to the mundane that we don't call the credibility of the person telling us of the events into question. This makes them more believable, and therefore more effective, and scarier.

Sources: Personal Account

The Church at Finney and Westwood, Salida, CA

I grew up in the small town of Salida, California. This story is once of the ghost stories that comes from my childhood.

At the corner of Finney and Westwood in Salida, there once stood a church. Now it is a parking lot and a large warehouse building for Salida Union school. But when I was a kid, it was an old church, the once-white paint now peeling and grey. The grass was patchy and sick looking. The interior lights were rarely seen turned on, though, as it was next to our school, we had little reason to see the church on Sundays when one would expect the lights to be turned on.

The church was surrounded by a grove of trees that that shed their leaves in the winter and looked like gnarled claws on trunks for a large portion of the year. Though the trees blossomed and were quite beautiful in the spring, this was not the image that stayed with us kids...no, we always thought of the church as being surrounded by evil leafless clawed trees, more creature than plant and malicious to the root.

We kids knew that the church was haunted. Some thought it was a Satanic church, others that it was an abandoned church on which evil had fallen, others that it was a church that had been abandoned and taken over by evil cultists, and others that it was a Christian church, but one built and pastored by an evil clergyman who was more interested in his own power than in religion (we were too young to understand or articulate it, but even as children we were aware of the corrupting nature of power, and it showed in many of the stories that we told each other). Our parents would assure us, usually while rolling their eyes, that the church was simply a building that had fallen into disrepair. But we knew better, we knew that it was haunted by something evil and corrupting.

The symptoms of the haunting, as far as my sisters and I ever felt them, were a vague sense of unease when walking by the church, and the occasional sense of being watched when near it. When one of us was feeling particularly brave, we might run up and touch the building, ensuring us both bragging rights and the (usually brief-lived) admiration of our siblings. Other kids told of tales they had heard - all of them second-hand of course - of sinister things inside the church. There were supposedly Satanic symbols near the altar, there was a painting of Satan that would kill anyone unwise enough to stare at it for more than 1 minute, and some stories said that the painting would leave the wall and float about the building of its own accord.

Of course, nobody ever entered the building to find out if these tales were true. No doubt we would have said that to do such a thing was foolish - suicidal even. But the truth is that this was part of our shared childhood folklore, and whether or not it we ever confirmed any of it was quite beside the point.

Commentary: As I said at the end of the story, this was part of our childhood folklore. We were frightened by the story, yes, but also thrilled by it. None of us ever looked for any evidence of the story - we never tried to get inside to church, we never inquired with people to find out if the church was still in use, and we never dared challenge someone who had come up with a new detail to the story. Whether or not it was true was beside the point. Walking close enough to touch the church was a test of bravery, and trading stories about the church was a favorite pastime.

When I was around 11 or 12, the church was renovated. The trees and lawn were tamed by gardeners, the white paint replaced with a fresh layer, and the doors were oftne left open on warm days, allowing members of the community to see inside the church. I don't know whether the church had ever been abandoned, but it had certainly not had the life that it would obtain during my teenage years. I never knew the pastor well, the church re-opened after my church-going years had ended, but I did know him at least in passing, and he always seemed to be a decent fellow and someone who was as concerned about his community as about his own church.

I don't know when the church was finally abandoned for good and torn down. It occured some time after I left Salida to go to college. By that time, it was no longer a terrifying edifece that harbored menacing spirits. It had become a part of the community. I wonder what the children in the area tell ghost stories about now.

A Haunting on 13th Street, Modesto, CA

I once again turn to the well, I go back to an article from an October, 2007, edition of the Modesto Bee (the newspaper of Modesto, CA and the surrounding area). The newspaper, like many regional newspapers, asked it's readers to submit their own personal stories of the supernatural int he run-up to Halloween. There were some really nice stories in there, including this one from a woman named Kim Meu. I'd paraphrase, but it seems better to just give a direct quote from the article:

Kim Meu of Modesto was a young single mother working the night shift when a ghost routed her from her rented home.

“About seven years ago, I used to live at a house on 13th Street in Modesto. Every night I would have dreams, seeing a dead cat, a skeleton in the back yard and a dead baby in the basement. During the day while I was asleep, I would hear male voices telling me to get out of this house.

“And when I used to sit up using my computer, I heard noises like someone was coughing or a little boy saying, ‘Mama.’ But I never thought anything of it.

“Until one day, after a year of living in the house, at about noon or 1 p.m. — I was working night shift — and my little boy was about 2 years old. He woke up and said, ‘Mommy, I want to watch TV.’ I was fully awake. I walked him to the living room and turned on a cartoon for him.


“I stood there with him and watched cartoons, then all of a sudden I felt something like a finger scratched me across my shoulder. I turned around really slow and my heart raced to about 150 beats per minute at the time, and there was nobody (there).

“I ran to the door to grab my son, milk and the diaper bag. I was in my pajamas (and went) straight to my mom’s house. I came back home a week later with my mom and sisters and never stayed there alone anymore. I moved out a month later.”

Commentary: This one is a good, old-fashioned ghost story. Notice that it has many of the elements that are included in the Amityville haunting but without going completely over-the-top as Amityville did. It's all very low-key: weird dreams, hearing voices, and feeling physical contact when nobody is there.

Is the story true? Well, I see no reason to doubt that Ms. Meu is stating her recollections honestly. Did things happen quite as she remembers? Who knows? As described in the entry on Shadow People, there are so many different ways that both our perceptions and memories can be affected that it's not posible to say with any authority what happened to Ms. Meu. And several internet searches failed to find any more stories about 13th Street.

But as a story, this is fantastic. The imagery of the dreams (especially the skeleton in the back yard and the dead baby in the basement) gives snatches of story that hint at bad deeds in the house's past. Coupled with the sound of a kid's voice during waking hours, this really hits the "creep out" button.

Whether you believe it or not, this is the sort of story that can keep you up at night, twitching every time you hear an unfamiliar noise.

Sources: Newspaper

The Demonic Mirror

In October, 2007, the Modesto Bee (the newspaper of Modesto, CA and the surrounding area) asked its readers to share their ghost stories for the usual Halloween scare-fest that most media attempt to put out.

Included in this story was one from a fellow Named Gary Metzger, who worked in an Italian Restaurant run by an older Sicilian man near Sacramento during the 1970s. The following is taken directly from the article:

“My boss told me to clean all of these gilded mirrors along one wall of the restaurant. He told me to leave alone one really old, dusty one at the end. Well, by the time I got to it, I forgot his orders. I dusted it off, squirted it with water and wiped it down.

“There was one smudge in the lower bottom corner that wouldn’t rub off. I looked at it real close, and it was like I was looking through it at this tiny pinpoint of light. And then the pinpoint got larger and this demonic face was jumping at me. It stayed in the mirror, but I yelped and my boss heard me. He came and took me to a table. He asked what I saw.

“He told me he had bought it in the old country and the salesman warned him there was a demon trapped in the mirror. He said the salesman also told him not to break the mirror or the demon would go free.”

Commentary: I'm not really sure how to classify this particular story, but it is a good one. On the surface, it appears to be a variation on folktales concerning evil spirits trapped in objects. The fact that it's a mirror fits, as these objects often have rather sinister natures in folklore as well as folk magic, and breaking this mirror would certainly bring bad luck.

Going with the folktale angle, the idea of a successful businessman purchasing a cursed item that will ultimately be his undoing is an old one. Though, in this case, the purchase is not claimed to have done him any good at all. I have to wonder why the Sicilian man doesn't claim that the mirror brings him business success due to the demon being trapped inside.

Another folktale angle is that of the apprentice dabbling into things that he isn't yet meant to know. He was told to clean the mirrors, but not one in particular. He forgets this admonition, and pays a fearful price for his lapse in memory. It's played out on a small scale, but the basic story arc is a familiar one.

On the other hand, depending on the religious leanings of Mr. Metzger, this story of the demon in the mirror might have another meaning. I have written in the past about how members of certain types of religious backgrounds use stories of demonic encounters as a way of proving their own worthiness, and it is possible that this is just such a story. However, without information concerning the religious background of Mr. Metzger, it's impossible to say if this is the case here.

Of course, one has to ask whether or not Mr. Metzger experienced something or not, and if so, what he experienced. It is, of course, entirely possible that this was simply a good, and very creepy story that he had come up with, and the newspaper's request for stories was an excellent opportunity to share it. If so, my hat's off to him.

It's also possible that he perceived something weird. In that case, one has to wonder what he perceived. Given the rather odd nature of both human memory and human perception, it is possible for someone who is both perfectly sane and perfectly honest to experience or remember experiencing something vividly that never happened. So, that's a possibility. The flipside is that something truly weird really did happen. However, without providing us with the name of the restaurant, or even which Sacramento-area town it was in, we can't check up on the story. So, we are at a dead end.

Sources: Newspaper

The Child Ghost of Ripon, California

When I lived in Ripon, I had a neighbor who lived in a haunted house. We would be out in the yard and see a shape that looked like a child, but without features, run into the space between the houses. When we would go to take a look, there was nobody and nothing there. Sometimes we'd hear kids playing when there was nobody around.

One night, my neighbor opened up a closet that had been closed ever since she bought the house. Inside of the closet, she found a box. Inside of the box was a small dress, like one that a very young girl would wear. As soon as she saw the dress, she was frightened, but didn't know how to react. When her husband came home from work, they talked about it and about the child-like figure that they had seen around the house, and both became more and more frightened as the evening went on.

Finally, they decided to burn the dress. They started a fire, and threw the dress in. As soon as the dress hit the flames, they heard a baby crying, and the crying continued until the dress was completely gone.

Commentary: This is another of the stories that I grew up with. One of the women in my neighborhood would tell this story, or some variation on it (it was always changing) to us kids. She loved to spin ghost stories for us, mostly because she seemed to like to entertain children, but also partially because ghost stories seemed to reinforce her particular religious view of the world.

As a kid, I bought this story, and asked for it many times. However, as I got older, the inconsistencies started to bug me, and I saw the stories of the neighbor for what they were: fun entertainments told by a genuinely warm and caring person who simply wanted to provide the children with fun in a safe environment, but not factual accounts.

I still love her stories. She told me the most memorable version of the Ouija Board Urban Legend that I have ever heard. And I have very fond memories of her as a neighbor and community member. So, in the end, her stories have done her credit, and I think that she would be happy to know that.

I was unsure how to classify this story. It clearly is a campfire story - a story told to entertain with a scare - based on the fact that the details were constantly changing and she didn't seem to much care how coherent the story was most of the time. It is centered around both a house and an object, so should it be considered a haunted house or a haunted object story?

To the haunted house story, I say no. It was always linked to some generic house, with no identifying details given, and the house seemed to be more a setting than an integral part of the story. A haunted object? Well, yes. The dress is certainly important to the story, and is clealry supposed to be the focus of the haunting.

Sources: Personal Account

Demonic White Noise, Georgia, USA

I usually don't include stories sent in to podcasts, but this one was too creepy to ignore.

A fellow named Archer, who lives in Georgia, sent an MP3 containing this story into the Anything Ghost podcast...

Archer had bought a white noise machine to help him sleep. You've probably seen these machines before, they produce various different sounds - rain, a flowing creek, etc. - to act as background noise, and cancel out other noises that may interfere with a person's sleep. Archer liked the creek setting, and would turn it on as he went to bed.

One night, a friend of Archer's was visiting from out of town. The next morning, he asked Archer about the talking machine that had been on all night. Archer explained that it was not a "talking machine" but a white noise machine, and that it had been playing the sound of a flowing creek. His friend insisted that he heard it speaking, though he couldn't understand the words, but Archer heard no such thing and figured that his friend was joking.

Later, another friend came to visit, and reported the same thing. After this visit, Archer decided to try turning the machine on and visiting different bedrooms in his home to see if there was something about the acoustics of the place that would cause the machine's noises to sound like speech. He found nothing, and just thought it was odd, without giving it much more thought.

A short time later, Archer went on a trip to another city. He brought the white noise machine with him, and turned it on when he was ready to go to sleep. This time, though, he didn't just hear the flowing creek, but rather the strange voice, and it was screaming in a deep, angry tone. While the screaming occurred, a hot wind began to blow through the hotel room. Archer hit the power button numerous times, but to no avail. He finally unplugged the unit from the wall, causing the sound to stop and the wind to stop blowing in the room.

He threw away the machine and has stated that he hasn't bought a replacement.


Commentary: So, this is the second "haunted object" that I have written about here. This is also an interesting one in that, given that it apparently hosted an angry spirit, it could also fall into the "demons" category, and might be thought of as a possessed object.

Unlike some of the other stories on this blog, my interest in this story comes not from an intellectual interest in the structure or elements of the story, but simply from the fact that it is a damn effective scary story. I have told the story to, or played the podcast for, several people, and all of them have been suitably creeped out by it.

I discovered the hard way that telling this story to your girlfriend late at night is a good way to get her both unnerved and angry with you. Thankfully, I have also discovered that this can be neutralized to a degree by suggesting that she imagine that, rather than a deep demonic voice emanating from the machine, the voice of Bill Cosby telling a rambling anecdote that goes nowhere is coming from the machine. Really, it's hard to be frightened when you imagine that the eternal damned babble incoherently about Jello pudding through a set of cheap speakers.

It's worth noting that devices that produce white noise, including white noise generators, but also including items such as electric fans or televisions and radios set to static, as well as devices that simply produce other types of random noise, can be thought to produce speech because of a phenomenon known as pareidolia - the tendency for the brain to perceive distinct patterns even when there is only randomness, in this case to hear voices or language where none actually is. This is likely the phenomenon behind most electronic voice phenomenon and the claimed backward messages on rock albums* as well as the tendency for people to see things such as religious figures in burn marks or alien spaceships in cloud formations.

But, of course, that wouldn't explain a machine screaming at the owner. Whether this is a case of something strange actually happening to Archer, or a case of someone simply wanting to tell a scary story to an audience via a podcast, I haven't a clue. But it makes for a damn good ghost story.

For more on how paradolia can cause us to hear things that aren't there, check out these two podcasts: this one and this one

Sources: Podcast (the story starts at the 30:14 mark)

Spectral Soldiers in My Bedroom

As a teenager, I woke up one night to hear the sound of artillery shells, and saw that my room was occupied by somewhat luminescent and translucent World War I-era soldiers, preparing to leave the trench for the machine-gun fed slaughter that was mistakenly called a "battle" during that war. I knew that I had to go with my comrades, as futile as it was, and so I began to don my backpack, pick up my rifle, and get ready. I was still in my room, but I knew that once I opened the door, I would be int he trench, and ready to fight. I went to the door, opened it, and saw my hallway...by this point, I had completely waken, and felt a bit foolish to be standing there in my backpack, holding a dowel that I had been keeping in my room for who-knows-what reason.

Commentary: I was unsure about whether or not I should include this story on this site. It's a description of events that occured to me when I was a teenager, and to which I have never attributed a supernatural cause. However, it does have a basic structure in common with many ghost stories, and like my experiences on the cliffs in Goleta, I decided to include it to illustrate a point that becomes relevant to anyone who works with personal accounts of hauntings.

The events that occured bore many of the features common to stories of hauntings: I woke up as a result of sounds, witnessed some truly weird spectres, and (in a slightly unusual, but not unheard of, twist) I joined these ghostly soldiers for battle. I could have viewed this as some sort of weird visitation or out-of-body experience, but instead I reflected on the fact that earlier in the evening I had been watching a television show about WWI-era trench warfare, and that the descriptions of the misery of the soldiers had really disturbed and gotten to me, and I also had been having trouble sleeping lately. Putting the two together, it became obvious that I was experiencing a mundane, if somewhat creepy, event.

The point to all of this is pretty simple. When I collect ghost stories from people, most of them tell me about events that occurred while, or shortly after, they had been resting, usually (but not always) in bed. The descriptions are usuall pretty simple - they see someone standing over them that vanishes, they hear strange sounds that they can't identify, or they perhaps even get out of bed and see/hear/smell something unusual. Invariably, the teller of the tale assures me that they were awake, and I hear those words "I know what I" saw/heard/smelt/etc. However, I have yet to hear one of these stories that is not absolutely compatible with near-sleep hallucinations. I also have never had a conversation with someone about such an experience in which they said that they had bothered to look for dosconfirming evidence before deciding that their experience was a supernatural one.

In short - when you are looking into people's stories, don't take everything at face value. They may have perceived something, and honestly believe that it was an external influence, when it was in fact something that came from their own physiology.

Sources: Personal Experience

The Old Lady on the Porch

When my grandmother was a kid, she lived in of Iquitos, a small town in Peru on the edge of the Amazon rain forest founded by Italian miners. One day, she was walking out to the rain forest, and when she passed the last house on the edge of the town, she saw an old woman sitting on the porch of the house. The old woman called her over, and when my grandmother came she was instructed to go and get adults from the town and have them enter the house.

My grandmother did as she was told, and when she brought the adults to the house, the old woman was no longer on the steps. They entered the house, and the old woman was lying in bed, dead. As it turns out, she had been dead for several days, but, having no family, nobody discovered this.

Once discovered, the woman was given a proper burial

Commentary: Yet another story from a coworker (when you tell people that you collect ghost stories, they tend to be more than happy to tell you theirs).

This story features a ghost trying to right a wrong, and see to it that her remains are correctly cared for. These sorts of stories are not unusual, though they usually take the form of urban legends (a friend of a friend told me) rather than being stories about specific people.

In addition to not being unusual, these sorts of stories are quite old. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer tells of a ghost of a murdered man leading the authorities to his murderer. Similar to the story considered here, the story of the Borley Rectory features a ghost attempting to have its remains properly buried. Greek paganism held that a person who was not properly buried would be forced to roam the Earth, never being able to find Hades. And outside of western cultures, it is a common belief that someone who is not properly buried will be unable to move on from this life.

This type of story speaks to how cultures view death. The proper disposal of human remains, whatever that may be in a particular culture, must be followed, or else a great ill will be visited either on the dead or on the survivors. Where this comes from is unknown, but even those who do not believe in a soul or afterlife tend to behave with extra special caution in seeing to it that a deceased person's wishes for disposal are carried out, indicating that this sort of impulse runs deep, either culturally or biologically, in humans.

Source: Personal Account

A Small Town Haunted House in Indiana

When I was a kid, there was an old house near the farm where I lived. It was abandoned, and had been for a long time. One day, a friend and I decided to investigate. We found a way in, and looked around the place. There was furniture there, and various stuff that belonged to whoever had lived there, but it was all dusty and kind of messed up.

We had this creepy feeling the entire time we were there, as if we were being watched, and it really creeped us out. After a little while, we got pretty scared and had to leave. As we left, we looked back at the house, and in the window on the top floor, we saw an old woman looking at us, watching us go. She looked angry.

I know what you are thinking, but nobody could have gotten into the place while we were in there. She hadn't been there before, and had to have been a ghost.

Commentary: This story is a personal account from an ex-girlfriend of mine. She grew up in a small town in rural Indiana, and like the kids from every town I know of, they had their local haunted house*. In this case it was a an abandoned, or assumed abandoned, farmhouse.

These locations are often the object of legend trippers, usually kids or adolescents, either looking for a thrill, to impress their peers, or on a dare. Typically these excursions are harmless, though they may result in property damage if the legend trippers are of a malicious bent. However, if the location is not as abandoned as it is thought, the legend trippers may find themselves running afoul of trespassing laws.



*In my home town, the local "haunted house" was actually a church that had fallen into disrepair. It was eventually restored and became a community fixture, which makes me wonder what the current "haunted house" in the neighborhood is. Maybe I should ask my nephews.

Sources: Personal Account

A Haunted House in New Albany, Indiana

I was living in a house in New Albany, Indiana. I had rented a room in the basement, and my room only had one light source. Despite the fact that I had only one light source, and could clearly see if there was anything in front of it, I would frequently see unexplained shadows moving across the walls. I always felt kind of creeped out at that place.

Eventually, a man who had been a healer in the Creek tribe came to live in the house. One day he approached me and said "hey, man, we need to talk."

"Talk about what?" I asked.

"About the things flying through the air."

Right about then, the shadows began moving on the wall. "You mean those?" I asked.

"Yep. Those."

............

On another occasion, I was in the bathroom shaving, using an adjustable mirror, when I saw a girl, probably a teenager, leaning against the doorway to the bathroom. I tried talking to her, and she just vanished.

..............

Eventually I asked the other people in the house about these happenings, and they all had stories. One person regularly saw people who appeared and vanished. One woman would leave the house having turned her computer off, only to return and find the computer turned on, and weird, cryptic messages typed on the screen.

Commentary: In many ways, this is a typical haunted house story - the house is host to many different repetitive events, none of which appear to be connected to each other, but all of which are found in the same location. Unlike many other haunted house stories, the events appear to have happened to each person uniquely - nobody experiencing anyone else's weirdness - although there was the shared experience of the shadows on the walls.

Regardless, the odd personal stories instead of a single communal story or single theme for the stories is interesting. What it means, if anything, is unclear.


Sources: Personal Account

In Need of a Spirit House

I was travelling in Thailand with friends. We noticed that many houses had a small pagoda on a platform outside of the house, and we asked what it was. We were told that it was a "spirit house", a shrine where spirits could live so that they wouldn't bother the people who lived in the actual house.

While we were travelling, we stayed at the home of a British ex-patriot who owned several houses and cabins on a piece of property. Unlike the Thai homes that we had seen, his property did not have a spirit house. We thought that this was interesting, but didn't make anything of it.

The first night that we were there, I was laying in bed with my friend Dawn. We heard the dog growling outside, so I got up to see what he was growling at. When I opened the door and looked to where he was growling, I say nothing. He continued to growl for a little while, maybe five minutes, and then whimpered and took off. I thought this was strange, but didn't make anything of it.

I went back to bed, and picked up the book I was reading. Then I started to hear the movement of the hammocks that had been strung up ont he patio, and heard some other noises I couldn't identify. After a few seconds of this, the lights turned off - and these lights were controlled by an old-fashioned switch, one that took some real force to turn off.

Maybe the owner should have set up a spirit house.

Commentary: This story came from a coworker who had spent a considerable amount of time travelling in Asia.

The belief in household spirits, whether conceived as the ghosts of the ancestors, the household gods (such as in ancient Rome), or as the spirits of nature is common across many cultures and across time. Religions and folklore that attest to the existence and importance of these beings ranges from ancient Rome to modern Asia, and appears to have been a strong element in many ancient versions of modern religions.

The measures necessary to appease or curry favor with these spirits likewise varies across time and space. In some cultures, it is necessary to give them their own dwelling place and make offerings. In others, veneration through prayer is necessary. Regardless, in most of these places, stories about what happens to those who fail to make proper respects indicate that the spirits will act malevolently, whether through acts of mischief and nuisance, or through more sinister actions including injury and death.

Sources: Personal Account

The Phantom Hand

I lived for a time in Richmond, Virginia. One night, while lying in bed, I felt a hand grab my ankle. After a moment, it let go. I looked down to see what was going on, and I saw a hand slowly sinking down below the edge of the matress, as if someone was under the bed. I cowered in the bed for a few moment, but finally worked up the courage to look under the bed. When I did, it was empty - nothing and no one there.

I ran out of the room and into the next room, where my housemates were talking. As soon as they saw me, one of them said "wow, you look like you've seen a ghost."

Commentary: This is a personal account from a coworker, one that I heard earlier today. When I first heard it, I loved the story, but wasn't sure what to put in the commentary. After all, it isn't tied to a particular storied location, nor is it part of local folklore, the story doesn't seem to serve any particular social purpose, and I have already written about the ghost sightings of sleeping people.

But, damn, it's a good story. And then it hit me - why not talk about what makes it a good ghost story?

Well, for starters, it's short - not a requirement (some very good stories are not short), but it helps the teller to keep the attention of the audience. And there is another element - that the hand was not simply felt, but seen. Creepiness within a story depends on a delicate balance. Too little detail and it's just someone shooting their mouth off and insisting that something mundane isn't. Too much detail, and the story becomes ponderous, and often sinks under it's own weight into a see of incredulous nonsense.

But just the right amount of detail...

See, if my coworker had simply stated that he felt something grip his leg, I would have nodded my head, collected the story in my personal notes, maybe eventually posted it here, but not given it much further thought. If he had claimed to have seen something under the bed, well, it might have been creepy, but it could just as easily left me rolling my eyes.

But seeing the hand,and then having it vanish...well, everyone in the truck this morning shivered a bit when that part of the story was told, and it helped that the storyteller used his own hand to illustrate how the phantom hand moved. It was creepy, unnerving, and you could tell by the grin on his face that the coworker loved the effect that this story was having on us.

Sources: Personal Account

A Night-Time Cry on the Beach

When I was a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara, I used to study until quite late in the evenings, taking a break for a few hours in the late evening (usually around 10:00) to take a walk and clear my head.

One of my freuqnet haunts was a cliff overlooking the beach south of Santa Barbara Shores Park, off of Hollister Avenue in Goleta. One breezy night, it must have been in the Spring of 2004, I was walking out there by myself. As a walked on a pathway overlooking the beach, the wind picked up, and above the wind, I heard what sounded like a baby crying. I moved towards the sound, but no longer heard it. Assuming it was just the wind, I began to walk back towards my car, when, through the breeze, I heard it again. I wasn't as certain of the direction this time, so I walked back towards where I had thought the sound had come from previously. Again, the sound faded away, and I was uncertain. This time, however, I spent time looking for possible sources, never finding one. I eventually left, feeling rather unnerved.

Although I suspect that it was just the wind whistling through the trees, I must confess that I returned to the location on a number of nights and never heard the sound again.

Commentary: This is my own personal story. I debated putting this up on the site due to the fact that I am inclined to think that there was a perfectly mundane explanation for what happened - likely just something odd about the wind on that particular night. However, as I thought about this, I realized three things:

A) It has all of the markings of a classic ghost story (dark night, atmospheric location, weird noise)

B) Although I see no reason to believe that this sound was anything supernatural, years of collecting ghost stories has taught me that there are many people who would likely either assume that it was, or tell it as such because, hey, it does make a good story.

C) The story was a good place to point to a basic principle that is useful for others who are interested in these stories: that the fact that the source of the sound is unexplained doesn't mean that it must be supernatural or that it was unexplainable, simply that it was unexplained. In this case, I think that there was something unusual going on with the wind int he trees that night,a nd that this was the source of the sound, but it may be some other explanation as well. This is especially useful to keep in mind if you are trying to talk to someone who is not inclined to believe a story - the lack of a known explanation is not the same as no explanation being possible.

Anyway, so that is a personal experience of my own.

Sources: Personal Experience

Porter College, University of California, Santa Cruz

The Santa Cruz campus of the University of California is divided into multiple residential colleges - individual semi-autonomous units where the students live and where administrative duties relevant to the students are taken care of. Each college has a specialty, and Porter College, on the western side of the campus, is primarily dedicated to the arts.

Porter is also home to some of the most ominous-looking buildings on the UCSC campus - grim concrete structures that loom more than stand. The residential halls (AKA the dorms) have basements in which students are allowed to live (or were allowed to live as of the time I graduated in 1998), an unusual feature for student housing buildings in California in general and Santa Cruz in particular.

Most of the stories concerning this place involve two buildings - Residence Hall A (aka Building A) and Residence Hall B (AKA Building B). In late 1998, a student killed himself in Building A. The suicide took place at a time and place that resulted in a large number of his fellow students witnessing his death - whether that was intentional or not I have not been able to determine. Since then, people have reported seeing this student wandering Building A, dressed as he was on the day that he killed himself.

Building B hosts two different stories. The first concerns a trio of rooms on the first floor known collectively as "the Bermuda Triangle." Reports from these rooms include objects moving on their own (sometimes as if they are being thrown violently), strange noises, and voices from unseen sources. All of this is accompanied by a general feeling of dread that permeates the rooms and their surroundings.

The other story for Building B concerns the third floor, where people report waking up and feeling as if they are being strangled and/or held down on the bed.

The Meadow - a large...well...meadow located in Porter College is also home to a ghost named Lily, the spirit of a transient woman who stayed there during the 1970s. She is usually seen dressed in rags or completely naked which, well, wouldn't really have differentiated her from many of the students at UCSC back when I was there.

I have heard these stories, and many others concerning generic feelings of dread, strange voices, briefly glimpsed apparitions, and the like from many of the Porter residents that I knew when I was a student at Crown College, across the Campus. Most of these stories were either clearly being told for entertainment purposes, or were told by rather overly-dramatic people who wanted solely to be the center of attention, and as such I was interested in the stories purely as entertainment and thought little else of them.

However, there is one exception. A woman who attended Porter, and has , eleven years later, become one of my closest friends, had some rather odd experiences. She is generally level-headed, and not given to fantasy-prone episodes, and so her stories are weightier to my mind than most of the others that I heard about Porter College.

She told me of numerous different happenings, most of them subtle, and most of them based either on perceived objects moving or sounds, or on general feelings of fear or malevolence experienced when in the residence halls. On one occasion, she opened the door to her room, and was left with a feeling that she describes as "being as if I had walked in on something, like a wolf had been breathing heavily, but suddenly became silent when the door opened and prey appeared."

On another occasion, she reports waking up in her bed with her arms stretched straight at her sides, and a general rigor-mortis-type feeling throughout her body.


Commentary: As stated above, Porter College is primarily dedicated to the arts, and as such it has the expected assortment of legitimate and talented young artists mixed in with overly-dramatic wannabes. Colleges in general are breeding grounds for ghost stories, and a place such as this even more so.

Porter's ghost stories are unusual in that the most famous undead resident, the student who killed himself, was a real person and not simply a fictitious construct. Stories of suicides-turned-ghosts are as common as college dormitory buildings, and usually are based on nothing but imagination. However, in this case, there really was a suicide, and it really was as public and disturbing as is usually described. Whether this occasioned new stories, or was simply meshed with previous stories of the ghost of a suicidal student, I do not know.

The experiences of my friend are somewhat difficult to explain. On the one hand, if I did not know the person, I would be quick to dismiss it as an overactive imagination. Certainly, some of the experiences she described to me (only two of many are described above) are consistent with well-known phenomenon such as sleep paralysis and waking dreams. Others, though, are more difficult to explain. Which is not to say that they can't be explained, but rather that I personally have not been able to do so, nor has anyone else provided a suitable explanation insofar as I know.

Porter is also host to many non-supernatural legends. It is rumored that the architect who designed had as his primary occupation the design of prisons, thus explaining the concrete blocks that stand-in for buildings at the college. This is, in fact, not true. The architect was attempting (and failing) to imitate traditional Japanese architecture, but did so using materials that resulted on one butt-ugly set of structures.

Also, it is rumored that Porter college was nearly named after Alfred Hitchcock, who had a home in Santa Cruz during the 1970s, but this is probably not true.

Also, general to UCSC and not just Porter, it is rumored that UCSC's non-centralized design (the various colleges are spread throughout a set of ridges in the forest) was intended to prevent student gatherings such as those at UC Berkeley. Given that the University was planned and built throughout the 1960s and 1970s, this seems reasonable. However, as someone who has gone through alot of the founding documents because of a job that I had while a student, I can tell you that there is no real truth to this rumor, and that the campus was designed as it is primarily for aesthetic reasons. Also, I can tell you from experience that the design of the campus has never prevented student protests.

All-in-all, Porter is one of the stranger parts of a very strange campus, even if you leave all ghost stories aside. However, the ghost stories give it that added element that just makes it particularly special.



SOURCES: Personal Accounts, Internet, Internet

The Hound Outside The Door

A friend has provided the following story:

"When I was a kid, probably eight or nine, I woke up one night and heard a sound outside my door. I got up and walked toward the door, opening it slowly, and when it was just cracked open, less than an inch, I heard a sound like a large dog snorting. I slammed the door shut, and held it there, hearing the creature move around outside the door. Once I was sure it was gone, I went back to bed."

Commentary: A lage number of stories start with the teller explaining that they had just woken up before the events unfold. This is unfortunate, as these stories don't tell you much or provide anything particularly new. There are a number of different plausible explanations for these events, ranging from the person having a particularly lucid dream but never being awake to the person being partially awake and mobile and yet still dreaming, all of which explain the events perfectly well. It's worth noting that, after the horrifying event took place, the teller usually reports that they went right back to sleep, which I, for one, wouldn't do if I had just lived through a disturbing event, but would do if I had simply dreamt it.

And, for the record, I have had some very weird, creepy experiences that I perceieved ot be occuring immediately after I woke up, including seeing a spectral platoon of WWI-era dougboys, and seeing my girlfriend intone strange and unfamiliar words in a voice filled with deep menace. However, in each of those cases, during each of which I believed myself to be awake and have my wits about me, but I decided to do a bit of follow-up investigation after the fact and determined that, in each case, it wasn't a ghostly experience, but simply my sleepy brain doing its own magic. So, for anyone who wishes to know, yes I have had this kind of experience, it has happened to me.

While these "I just woke up" stories are themselves not particularly interesting, what is interesting is how important they can become to the teller. When you suggest a plausible explanation that is natural (such as that it was a dream) you can expect to be greeted with a very hostile reaction - usually having the person shout some variation on "I know what I saw!" or "I wasn't asleep!" Why is it that these types of events become so important to the people who perceived them? I don't know, but THAT is what is interesting about them to my mind.

Haunted Bathroom

Some years back, my girlfriend moved with her then-husband (yes, they are now divorced) back to Santa Clara County after having lived in Sacramento. They rented a two-bedroom/two bathroom apartment in a modern apartment complex. On the whole, it was a nice place, but there was one thing that always bothered the couple: one of the bathrooms didn't feel quite right. The couple rarely used that bathroom, guests avoided it and used the other bathroom, the cats wouldn't go into the room, and whenever anyone would take a shower in that bathroom they would report feeling on-edge the entire time, as if they were expecting someone or something to attack them. One time, a cat was locked into the bathroom while the rest of the apartment was being cleaned, and when it was let out, the cat attcked my girlfriend, something that it never did when locked in the other bathroom.

Commentary: I have come across a number of similar stories - a room that simply doesn't feel right, nothing is ever sean or heard, no truly weird or unexplainable events occur, but the room just feels wrong, and everyone seems to notice it and react to it whether they have been told about it or not.

I am fascinated by this type of story for a simple reason. While some of these stories have pretty obvious explanations (if you tell everyone that a particular room is creepy, the power of suggestion can go along way), others don't. To be certain, there is not shortage of possible explanations, running the gamut from the reasonable to the absurd, but I have yet to see one that clinches the deal. In other words, this is one of those places where a clear explanation as to what is really going on is completely lacking, and that makes it interesting.

I have little else to say, but this sort of story, where I don't yet have an explanation, is one of the things that keeps me interested in ghost stories.

Sources: Personal Account

Grandfather Ghosts

After my great grandfather's death, many of my family members reported hearing strange sounds in my grandfather's house. They would hear doors open and close, and the sounds of footsteps walking around at night. Whenever anyone would ask my grandfather what the sound was, he'd say "that's just my dad, coming to check up on us."

The house is an old one, and you can not only clearly recognize the sounds of footsteps, but you can also accurately determine where in the house they are coming from by sound alone. Although my family tried to explain it away with descriptions of the house settling, noen of them were ever happy with these descriptions.

Thirteen years ago, in my last few months living in Stanislaus County before heading to UC Santa Cruz, my grandfather died. After this happened, family members tell me that there have been no more mysterious sounds or unusual happenings. However, my father reports that he now hears opening/closing doors and footsteps in his house at night. Perhaps it is the fate of the men of my family that we get to spend eternity looking after the poor housekeeping habits of our male descendants. If that's the case, then here's hoping that I have daughters.



Commentary: I have heard this story from numerosu family members for many years. Myself, I have never heard nor seen anything unusual in either my grandfather's or my father's house, so I can not confirm any of the story.

What is interesting to me, however, is that the ghost, if indeed that's what it is, doesn't seem to be viewed with fear or suspicion by the family, but simply as a manifestation of a deceased relative's concern. This is especially interesting as some of the family members who are quite comfortable with the presence of this ghost (or ghosts) have commented that other alleged hauntings were not the work of dead humans but of demons and other diabolical forces. However, when questioned about their own experiences, they opt for the more comforting answer.



SOURCES: Personal experience, Personal account

Pursuing Demon

“You don’t believe in demons? You’re being a fool! I know that demons are real. I was out at Robert’s house one day. I knew it was time to go, so I got on my bike and started to ride home. After a little while, I felt something that was just wrong. I felt this really intense cold behind me, and I looked around and saw a ball of…just blackness coming after me. I knew it was evil, I could feel it, and I knew I had to get away. I rode as fast as I could, all the way home, knowing that this thing was chasing me. I finally got home, and when I looked, it was gone. THAT is how I know that demons are real!”

Commentary: This is probably one of the first “personal account” stories that I collected, back when I was in high school. I listened as one of the other students in my electronics class told this story to another student who had begun to be open about his skepticism of supernatural claims. At the time, I dismissed the story as nonsense, but I see it somewhat differently now.

Was this kid making the story up, or did he have an experience that he couldn’t understand or explain (whether or not someone else might be able to understand or explain it)? I don’t know, but that’s not what interests me about this story. What interests me is how this story was used as a social tool.

In order to understand what interests me about this story, I have to give you a bit of background information. This kid, we’ll call him Joseph, was a member of an Evangelical Christian church that firmly believed in the reality of “spiritual warfare” – the idea that heavenly and diabolic forces were locked in combat and that humans were playing a rule in a real and bloody war through their choices and politics.

I heard Joseph tell this story under two circumstances – when he was trying to sway someone over to Christianity, or when he was talking to other members of his church. In the first case, the use of the tool was clear- it was intended to persuade someone that they were in danger and only Joseph’s group could save them from that danger. Joseph’s target on that day didn’t buy it, but nonetheless, it was pretty clear what Joseph was trying to do.

The other time that I heard this and similar stories was when Joseph and other members of his church had gathered together. They would trade “spiritual warfare” stories – most of which were much milder, those sorts of things that could easily be chalked up to an overactive imagination (“I was in my room reading a book that I knew I wasn’t supposed to be reading, when I felt a cold presence, and it frightened me, so I prayed….”). Joseph’s, however, was not alone in its more explicit nature – actually seeing the demon, having to escape, etc. These stories seemed to serve both for social bonding, they were stories that everyone told to frighten or excite each other and bring the group closer together. These stories were also as a sort of one-upsmanship, this particular group (and similar ones that I have encountered since then) viewed encounters with demons as a badge of honor – something that demonstrates how the teller encountered and defeated a demon, a religious variation on “big fish” stories.

SOURCES: Personal Account