Ghosts Among Us: True Stories of Spirit Encounters

“I’ve never told anyone this before because I’m afraid people will think I’m crazy …”

That is the way the letters often begin. I get them every day from people all over the world who have seen ghosts. The experiences have left them awestruck, amazed, excited, or frightened. They are not sure if they can trust their own eyes. The world they knew—or thought they knew—was turned inside out for a surreal moment they will never forget. They need to tell someone.

After reading this author’s Coast to Coast Ghosts: True Stories of Hauntings Across America, they decide that I am one person who will believe them. And I do.

Sometimes they simply need reassurance. Sometimes they need advice. And sometimes they simply want to tell their stories.

With the writers’ permission, I’ve chosen a few of these letters to share with you. Here is a peek into my mailbag!

I am 20 yrs. old, and live in Springdale, Arkansas. When I was a little girl, about ten or eleven years old, we lived in a house that I could have sworn was haunted by some force. I wasn’t sure what it was, and I hadn’t seen anything, but I had that gut feeling.

I slept with my bedroom door cracked. One night, I looked in the shadowed area between my door and the wall. I saw a man standing there, and it freaked me out. To this day I remember exactly what he looked like and exactly what he was wearing. He was an older man, with a bald spot on top, and a white ring of hair around that bald spot. He was about 5′9″ and he was wearing a red and black, long-sleeve flannel shirt; along with a pair of blue jeans. He just stood there and watched me, until I got the nerve to get up and turn on my lamp. When I did so, he was no longer there. The man in my room had disappeared, leading me to believe that my room, if not my whole house, was haunted.

I never told anybody about what I had seen because I was afraid that they would make fun, or that they wouldn’t believe me at all. I didn’t even tell my own sister about it. She is a year and a half older than I.

Now, the odd thing is that about a year after I saw the man in my room, my sister came home from school, and she was freaked out. I asked her what was wrong. She said, “I was in the bathroom after school, waiting for Mom to pick me up. I was fixing my hair in the mirror, and in the bathroom stall behind me was a man standing there watching me. I thought it was the janitor so I turned around to leave. When I turned around, he wasn’t there.”

I asked my sister what he looked like, and she said, “He was about 6’ tall, with a bald head, but with a little bit of white hair around the bottom of his head. He was wearing a red and black, long-sleeve flannel shirt with jeans.”

When I heard this, I about flipped out. I was very scared. I asked her what he was doing, and she told me that he was just watching her. I told her that I had seen the same man in my bedroom about a year before.

Do you think he could be my guardian angel? Is it possible that my sister and I have the same one?

Though no one can say for certain who the apparition was, my guess is he was not an angel. Angel experts insist that people who encounter them are never frightened but left with an overwhelming sense of peace.

In further communication, Kellie said that the man did not resemble any deceased family members that she was aware of. It is possible that the ghost seen by Kellie and her sister originated from either the school or their home and followed them to the other place. Perhaps the Martin sisters resembled someone he was attached to in life.

I am the mother of an autistic son. I have never before talked about the experiences I have had with my son, for fear that somebody might think I am insane. I will do my best to describe what happened.

The first incident occurred long before Nathan^* was diagnosed with autism. He was an incredibly intelligent baby, yet did not speak a word, though it appeared he was inventing his own language. He seemed to have some kind of relationship with walls. He would stare at the walls and laugh hysterically. He seemed to be watching a silent, invisible movie. One day he stood very close to the wall and whispered unintelligible words from his own language. Then he put his finger over his mouth and said, “Shhh.”

This was very unusual because he did not interact with anybody ever for any reason. He had never made the shushing noise before.

At first I wrote this off as autistic behavior, but then I began to wonder if Nathan was interacting with a world the rest of us couldn’t see.

Nathan was something of a savant—displaying extraordinary mental agility, as autistic children sometimes do. He knew things he should not know. He could count, instantly add and subtract without use of words, numbers, or symbols. Though I am a math whiz, my son seemed to have some kind of magic with numbers.

But he also appeared to sense things, long before the rest of us. Each morning of the day we were to visit my family, Nathan vomited. Every time. For years.

The “coincidence” here is that my family has since disowned me. They did not approve of the fact I refused to send Nathan away because of his autism. They could not accept what they perceived to be a flaw in him. Nathan always seemed to have some kind of ESP, and I wonder if he knew they hated him for being autistic.

One of Nathan’s aides at school witnessed an occurrence of ESP. She had put some jelly beans in her desk drawer before he arrived. She said that he walked in that morning and immediately went into the drawer and grabbed the jelly beans. She was shocked, as no one else knew the candy was there and Nathan broke his normal routine to go to the drawer—something unheard of with autistic people.

One of the most incredible things occurred when we moved into our cottage five years ago. One morning Nathan motioned for me to come into his room. He pointed at the wall where the light switch is. I thought he wanted the light on, so I told him he could turn it on. He then took my hand and we walked into the bathroom, where he got a small piece of toilet paper and handed it to me. Then he motioned for me to go back to his room with him. He looked at the same spot on his wall and said, “Ghost is crying.”

He motioned for me to wipe away tears with toilet paper. Nervous, I laughed. He repeated, “Ghost is crying.”

I was baffled, as this was completely contradictory to his behavior. He does not talk that way. He does not behave that way. He doesn’t have an abstract imagination. I admit that it freaked me out. A few minutes later I went back to his room and tried to ask him about it. As usual, there was no reaction to my words.

The autistic mind is somewhat of a mystery. Not lacking in intelligence, the special people afflicted with this malady think differently from the rest of us. Challenged to communicate with others, they often have extraordinary abilities superior to “normal” people. A correlation between autism and ESP along with the ability to see ghosts has been noted. Nathan’s mother hopes that serious research will be done on this connection, and her story has been passed along to paranormal researcher Dr. Sally Rhine Feather, Director of Development at the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina.

I am working up the nerve to tell you of a very strange experience I had in Washington, D.C., many years ago. When I was sixteen, I went out East to participate in a program to study Congress. As the only liberal in a group of fifty teenagers, I tended to get ganged up on in debates. During one particularly lively debate on Social Security, I got pushed over a chair, spraining my ankle.

The emergency room was busy, so I was placed in a curtained-off area to wait until a doctor was available. The curtain next to me opened slightly, and I saw another teenager on a gurney, crying. I could see that she was a very pretty black girl, despite the fact her face and chest had been cut so badly. She’d evidently lost a lot of blood. Her face was pale and her eyes stared as if she couldn’t focus. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me about a ghastly rape at knifepoint. Still crying, she rolled over and went to sleep.

Eventually, a nurse came in to see me. “Will Sharon be all right?” I asked, angry that she had been left alone when she was clearly in so much pain. Looking startled, the nurse asked me what I was talking about. I told her that I had been chatting with the girl, and she had told me all about her rape.

Very much to the nurse’s credit, she believed me. Since I could not walk at the time, there was no question of my having gone into the next cubicle to read Sharon’s chart. She also did not tell me that the girl had died twenty minutes before I arrived and was no longer in the adjacent cubicle. I found that out later, after the nurse had fetched a police officer.

To this day, I do not know if the nurse told the officer when I had the conversation with Sharon. I suspect not. The officer listened very seriously to my account of what Sharon had said, which included many details about her attackers. He took notes and asked me follow-up questions, exactly as if I had been a witness to Sharon’s dying declaration.

After the officer left and I was bandaged up, the nurse took me out into the waiting area in a wheelchair. Just before we exited the emergency room, she whispered in my ear that we should keep my seeing Sharon’s spirit as our little secret. It was not until that moment that I realized that Sharon was a ghost.

In response to my frightened questions, the nurse said this was not the first time that she had seen a murder victim’s spirit hang around to testify, and Sharon was lucky to have found someone who could hear her so quickly.

I do not know if the police ever caught Sharon’s attackers. I was certainly never contacted to testify. I imagine that the officer would have had a hard time reconciling the hospital records of when she died with when I arrived. I do know, however, that I was correct about where her various wounds were, because the officer checked my account against a drawing in her chart. And I am positive that Sharon wanted her story told.

Other than talking with the police officer, I have kept this as a secret between me and the nurse for all of these years. I have reservations about passing it along at all, because one wouldn’t want to touch off a spate of emergency room victims making things up about one another.

Yet if this is a common type of spirit appearance, I am surprised that I’ve never seen or heard a similar story.

Twelve years ago my husband and I moved into half of an old Victorian duplex in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. From the beginning, the place gave me the creeps. Doors would inexplicably open and close and footsteps echoed in the empty hallways. I’d also experience rushes of cold air. My engineer husband would always have some logical explanation for the occurrences.

Many mornings when I was alone and my husband had gone to work I would clearly hear, “Edith!^* Edith!” in a plaintive, childlike voice. It frightened me so much that I started to leave the house several hours early so as not to be alone.

On Halloween nobody came to our house. We were baffled as we watched the children cross the street to avoid our home.

Finally I did some research and found a magazine and a newspaper article reporting on a death from twelve years before. A woman named Marion Walls^* plunged to her death from the attic of our house!

Her husband told the police that she had been hanging curtains when the accident occurred. Yet, she had been naked and her ankles and wrists were bound. The paperboy and neighbors had come forward to report that Mr. and Mrs. Walls played strange games and that they had seen her dangling from the attic window before. Until the accident, Mr. Walls had always managed to rescue her by pulling her into the window from the floor below.

I checked and saw that there were indeed dents on the windowsill apparently made by rope burns. Browsing the old obituaries, I found that the viewing of Marion’s body was held in the parlor of our house and was hosted by her sister, Edith.

There were many incidents during our year in that house and even my straight-laced, black and white, engineer husband came to believe that Marion’s ghost was there. When we moved out I told the landlord about it and he said, “Oh, my wife divorced me after we moved here. She always got the creeps in that house.”

Prior to our moving out, the man in the other half of the duplex made an annoyed comment to my husband about “all the racket last night.”

We’d heard it too and assumed it was them having a party. He also mentioned hearing people running up and down the stairs, which we had heard as well. Needless to say, we were pleased to get out of there.

My husband and I went to a restaurant in Canada called Ed’s. It is about a one-hundred-year-old house that has now turned into a very famous Calgary landmark restaurant.

Something very strange happened to me while I was heading up the stairs to the washroom. On my way up, I found myself behind an old lady who appeared to be in her eighties. She was moving very slowly. Her gnarled hand grasped the handrail as she inched her way up. I did not want her to feel rushed so I stayed a couple of stair steps behind her. She finally made it to the top and we both headed for the washroom. I reached in front of her to open the door, and she entered before me. She never turned to look at me at any time.

The old woman ambled into the first stall as I went to a mirror to put on my lipstick. I washed my hands, fixed my hair, and applied more lipstick. Then I realized that there were no noises coming from the stall the old lady had entered.

Worried, I pretended to fix my boot and peeked under the stall to see if she was okay. No one was there.

I quickly left the washroom and found three waitresses folding napkins. I asked them if they had seen the old lady. None of them had so I rushed downstairs and asked the hostess if she knew where the old lady had gone.

The hostess had not seen the woman, but she had a knowing look in her eyes. The place was haunted, she told me, and explained that many odd things happened there.

I always thought that a ghost would be transparent and that I would be really freaked out if I saw one.

If this truly was a ghost, she seemed to be unaware of the people around her. She was able to touch things and not go through them. I believe I saw a ghost and consequently am no longer afraid of them.

In January 1992, I bought a little house on Nantucket Island, off the coast of Cape Cod. I uprooted myself from Boston and got a job in a hotel and real estate company. My family helped me move one stormy weekend. They stayed one night with me and left the next day. I had a good day unpacking my things and settling in. I fell into bed exhausted at the end of the day, listening to the wind howling around the house and the foghorn blowing in the harbor. In the middle of the night, I saw an old woman standing over me, bending down and staring at me. I started screaming and I guess I would have to say woke up, but the vision was so real it didn’t seem like I was sleeping. The sounds of my screams echoed off the walls because I hadn’t had a chance to put any curtains up to muffle sound.

The next morning I met my next-door neighbor. I told her I had seen a ghost in the house. My neighbor, a very practical woman, said, “Oh, did she have gray hair?” To which I replied, “Yes.”

My neighbor replied, “Oh, don’t worry, that was Virginia. She owned the house before you. She and her husband bought it as a retirement home but then he died before they moved here. His ashes are buried in the yard under the cherry tree. When she died, she was buried in New Jersey, near her daughters. All you have to do is tell her that you love the house and will take care of it and the tree.”

Well, I thought it was a little odd but I said those words aloud that night and didn’t see the ghost again.

Four months later I rented the second bedroom to a summer worker who had answered an ad I placed on the town bulletin board. Her first night there I woke up to screams and ran out into the living room at the same time she did. She shouted, “I just saw an old lady in my room!”

I asked her if she had gray hair and wore a housedress and she said yes. I told her to tell her she loved the house and would take care of it and the tree. She went back to her room and followed my instructions.

Though Susan Beaupre Kish now lives in Switzerland, she still visits Nantucket. She reports that her former home has been sold and enlarged. Whenever she is in the area, she stops by the cherry tree to pay her respects to Virginia’s husband.

Imagine a small rock house resting 2,200 feet up on the side of a hill. The view is immense and spectacular. Massive oak trees and dense cedar brush provide a natural barrier to what most of us think of as civilization. The isolation is not total, however. One can see a sprinkling of houses within the thick vegetation. Now imagine a bitter old man and his disagreeable daughter in alcoholic rages shouting and threatening to kill one another. The neighbors frequently call the Kendall County Sheriff’s Department to intervene in these violent skirmishes. Several times a year an ambulance pulls in the driveway, retrieves the old man, and hauls him off to the Kerrville VA Hospital to dry out. This is their way of life. These are the people who lived in our house before us.

Hard freezes are uncommon in South Texas. Ice storms are a rarity. My husband, John, and I began our move to Boerne one icy January day in 1997. We had not closed on our mortgage loan, but the executor of the estate that owned the house gave us permission to begin moving in.

We moved a U-Haul load over on a frigid Saturday afternoon; I stayed at the new place and John went back to the old house to get another load. The bad weather worsened. A terrible ice storm began and he couldn’t make it back. I was in the new house alone with no heat and no telephone. John had built a fire in the fireplace and had left a few small logs but neither one of us had expected to stay the night. After cleaning the kitchen cupboards and lining them with paper, I began unpacking boxes. The weather worsened again and I could hear ice being pelted up against the house. I instinctively knew that there was no way that John could make it back. I ate a can of tuna and lay down exhausted on a mattress in the master bedroom. I had a small radio and turned it on, more for the noise than anything else. After a few minutes I heard noises from the kitchen. I went to look and all of the cupboard doors were open. Being somewhat compulsive in nature, I closed them and hurried back to the mattress. Again I heard noises. Once more I got up and once more the cupboard doors were open. I knew that I had closed them. A light came on in the laundry room and I got scared. A few minutes later the light went off in the laundry room and one came on in the master bath. The door between the laundry room and bathroom slammed shut. I ran to another bedroom. I knew that I was going to be killed that night. The pattern repeated itself. This time I heard the cabinet doors open and close. More lights came on in the laundry room. Lights went off in the bathroom. I noticed that the area of activity was confined to those places. By daybreak I was certain that I had experienced a restless ghost. My husband arrived shortly thereafter. He was skeptical.

Monday morning at the closing, the lady at the title company asked us if we knew that the previous owner had committed suicide in the house. I looked at John and said, “I told you there was a ghost in that house!”

The ghost made his presence known almost every night. I guess we just became accustomed to him. As time passed, the living and the dead coexisted with little notice. For reasons that I won’t go into here, several months after we moved in we sued the estate that had owned the house. The executor was the ghost’s sister. She informed us that she was dying of lung cancer. The ghost’s son lived in Florida and was dying of AIDS. Our certified letter to the ghost’s daughter was returned. She had committed suicide a few days before our letter to her was mailed. Our ghost was gone. We last heard him on the day of his daughter’s death.

A few months later I was on a ladder stripping wallpaper off the master bathroom walls and over the doorway I noticed some odd-looking stains. They were brown and appeared to be splatters. I was certain that I was looking at bloodstains. I called John into the room and after looking closely, he came to the same conclusion. We also came to the horrible realization that those splatters were most likely not from a self-inflicted wound.

One day in conversation with one of our neighbors, I mentioned something about our ghost’s suicide. He told me that the sheriff’s department had investigated the death and had come to the conclusion that it was a homicide and that the daughter was their number-one suspect. They had not been able to prove their suspicions.

I know that what we experienced was a ghost. I also know that he has not been back since the death of his daughter. And, yes, I feel in my heart that she killed him.

Anita Porterfield writes that her home is now a peaceful place. Reports of paranormal activity surrounding places of murder or suicide are common. When the alleged killer finally died, her victim may have been freed from the need to avenge his death. Or did her spirit manage to evolve and rescue his? Perhaps she came for him so they could resolve their conflicts and move peacefully into the afterlife.

I still have nightmares about a rental house I lived in over thirty years ago. When we moved into the Little Rock, Arkansas, house in 1972, it felt a little strange but we put it down to a change in scenery. My mother was disabled and newly divorced, so things were a bit strange. Then one Friday night, my sister Laura, myself, and my mother were in the front bathroom. Mom was brushing her teeth and Laura was sitting cross-legged on the toilet, and I was perched on the side of the bathtub. We were discussing our dates with Mom, telling her about what was going on in our lives. It was around 10:30 P.M.

We heard something in the dining room. (You could see across the hall into the dining room from the bathroom.) My mom looked toward the noise and got a funny expression on her face, so we looked too. We saw a woman who bore a striking resemblance to my older sister, Marion (now deceased). She was tall, blonde, a little pale, and was wearing a long white nightgown and was barefooted. She looked like she was floating about a foot off the floor. My mom asked what she wanted and she turned her head and looked at us and then went through the French doors into the living room.

As months went by, several others saw ghosts in our home. There were two that seemed to “live there.” One was the blonde woman, who appeared to be in her mid-twenties and stood approximately 5′9–10″. She stayed in the front of the house in the dining room and living room area. There was also an older man. He had dark hair, was bearded, and appeared angry. Just his upper torso would appear.

There was a back room that felt so creepy that all of us avoided it, friends and family alike. We later found out the house had a reputation for people moving out in the middle of the night. We lasted about seven or eight months.

To this day, the house is still the only rental house on the block. I know it sounds crazy, but many people saw apparitions there. It was not a group hysteria thing, as we had guests that came to visit—with no idea of what was going on—leave literally screaming in the night.

We never said a lot about it to our neighbors. They would have thought we were all crazy. The house is like a bad dream.

My husband and I drove by the house the other day. It still looks the same. It was built up on a small hill and is all dark red brick with a big front porch. The back butts up to an alley. It looks perfectly ordinary, but inside the place you can feel how creepy it really is.

As Lisa and I corresponded about the nightmare house from her past, we both grew more curious. She proved to be a diligent researcher, digging up information on the history of the home. She found that the house was built in 1925 and she acquired a long list of the home’s occupants.

Lisa noted that the first owners of the home were a young couple—the bride just twenty-six. Interestingly, the woman died in November 1972, just months after Lisa’s family moved into the rental.

A common theory among paranormal investigators is that ghosts can appear in the shape of their former selves at any age. If this is the case, then perhaps the ghost was drawn back to her first home and appeared as she did when she lived there in the 1920s.

It is also possible that the ghosts belonged to people who lived in a different house built at that location long before 1925.

Who was the angry man—and why was he so angry? Lisa Duckworth and I are still curious and she continues her research into the mysteries of the Little Rock house.

Curtain Call

Theaters are notoriously haunted. Almost every old theater seems to claim a ghost or two. What is it about them that makes them so haunted? Is it the extreme emotion of the actors that attracts ethereal beings?

That is one theory. But it is not just the theaters that feature stage productions that swirl with paranormal phenomena. Old movie theaters, too, are home to ghosts.

Perhaps it is the fact that the configuration of theaters rarely changes that makes them candidates for hauntings. The rows of seats are anchored and the aisles cut permanent paths beside them.

This writer has noticed an unusual number of ghost sightings in old places where furniture is not moved and the environment is unaltered. (Old restrooms and staircases are also good examples of this phenomenon. Ghost sightings are frequent here too.)

Perhaps when the physical setting doesn’t change, the energy from past events remains intact. Perhaps it takes a sort of cosmic sweeping—a rearranging of the environment—to release this energy.

Or maybe when the space is not rearranged it is so familiar to a stuck soul that they have trouble realizing that things have indeed changed and it is time to move on.

Whatever the reason, there are haunted theaters all over the world, including the following:

Working Overtime

Florida’s Tampa Theatre, opened in 1926, is said to be home to a man who died there. He was the projectionist for decades until his death at the theater in the 1960s. This ornate movie palace, decked out in Florida Mediterranean style, is on the National Register of Historic Places. Over 150,000 people enjoy films and concerts there each year. The man, who perished in the projection booth, is thought to be responsible for the odd occurrences there, including the inexplicable sound of jingling keys and the moving of objects from place to place. Some report that they feel his phantom fingers caress their necks.

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TAMPA THEATRE

711 FRANKLIN STREET

TAMPA, FL 33602

(813) 274-8286

WWW.TAMPATHEATRE.ORG

Still Hanging Around

The Rialto Theater in Winslow, Arizona, has long been legendary as a haunted hot spot. Once an opera house, it has seen its share of drama on and off the stage.

A ghostly lady appears on a balcony, where she allegedly hung herself. Employees have reported hearing laughter and conversation emanating from the first row of the empty theater seats when the Rialto is closed. The thick, flowery scent of vintage perfume wafts through the air in the old dressing rooms despite the fact they have not been used for half a century.

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RIALTO THEATER

115 WEST KINSLEY STREET

WINSLOW, AZ 86047

(928) 289-4100

Imprints

Mann’s Chinese Theater (once known as Grauman’s Chinese Theater) opened its doors in 1927 and has been a Hollywood landmark ever since. Rising ninety feet high, the bronze roof has patinaed to a lovely shade of jade. Tourists from around the world visit its sidewalk. It is here that stars left their prints in wet cement. This tradition began as an accident when silent screen actress Normal Talmadge stumbled into some wet cement and left her print. While over two hundred stars have left their mark outside of the theater, several mysterious presences have left their mark inside. It is here that witnesses say that phantom hands yank on the stage curtain and play pranks on people in the dressing rooms. Some credit the haunting to actor Victor Kilian, who was viciously murdered nearby in 1976.

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MANN’S CHINESE THEATER

6925 HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD

HOLLYWOOD, CA 90028

(323) 464-8111

Encore

The original Rhode Opera House in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was built in 1891, several blocks from Lake Michigan. Damaged by fire five years later, it was rebuilt on the same spot and folks have been gathering there to be entertained ever since. In addition to showcasing live performances, it has also served as a movie theater.

Today it is home to the Lakeside Players, a community theater group that is dedicated to enthralling audiences. They make no secret about the fact there are ghosts in their midst. In addition to hearing phantom piano music and disembodied laughter, witnesses report seeing a transparent man running between rows of seats, and sitting in a seat near the back of the theater.

A child was reportedly visiting backstage when she suddenly exclaimed about the beautiful ladies. The baffled adults asked her to explain and she described women in long gowns that only she could see.

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RHODE OPERA HOUSE

514 FIFTY-SIXTH STREET

KENOSHA, WI 53140

(262) 657-PLAY (7529)