GHOST STORIES

It was a dark and stormy night. Uncle John was in the “reading room” when a disembodied voice suddenly whispered into his ear, “You don’t have to believe in ghosts to be entertained by ghost stories.”

A PAIR OF JACKS

Amanda Teague, a 45-year-old single mother of five from Northern Ireland, told this odd love story to People magazine in 2014. She was lying in bed one night when the ghost of an 18th-century Haitian pirate appeared and introduced himself as Jack—which is quite a coincidence, because Teague performs as a professional Captain Jack Sparrow impersonator herself. Over the next few months, Teague and the ghost pirate got to know each other. He told her he’d been left at the altar and that he was later executed for thievery; she told him about her life impersonating Johnny Depp’s Pirates of the Caribbean character. Then it got even weirder as the two developed…feelings for each other. Before long, Teague was on a boat in international waters getting married to Jack. A medium was brought along to say “I do” for the ghost pirate, and Teague (dressed as herself, not as Depp) placed a ring on a candle in place of Jack’s finger. Sadly, in 2018, she told the Irish Times that she and Jack had gotten divorced. She wouldn’t say why, only warning others, “Be VERY careful when dabbling in spirituality, it’s not something to mess with.”

NOT-SO-MERRY PRANKSTERS

“A Pervy Ghost’s Stealing My Knickers!” reported the Mirror in 2014. But it was no laughing matter for the woman who had her knickers stolen, Pauline Hickson. And the activity went way beyond that: “One day me and my sister came back from the shops and the kitchen looked like someone had wiped it down with dirt and then freeze-dried it.” At first Hickson, 58, thought her sister was pranking her, but as the strange activity increased, she started to suspect her friends, all of whom vehemently denied having anything to do with it. “I didn’t believe anyone and I started to lose people from my life,” Hickson lamented. “I would spend all day just wandering around the streets, trying to stay out of the house.” It got so bad that she moved from Hull (in northern England) to a flat in Cambridge, about 150 miles southeast. Then the activity not only continued, she says, it increased: Her clothes went missing—especially, for some strange reason, her underwear. The shower would turn on in the middle of the night. And then she’d wake up to find dishes all over the kitchen floor and scratches on the wall. At this point Hickson was convinced that several ghosts were tormenting her. Even though she moved seven times in two years—sometimes living in hostels—she couldn’t seem to shake them.

Randy Newman’s uncle wrote the “20th Century Fox Fanfare” music.

Not knowing what else to do, she hired paranormal investigator Steve Kneeshaw. He performed a “hypno-exorcism,” which is just what it sounds like: he hypnotized Hickson and then performed an exorcism, which concluded with a “blast of cold air” that carried the apparitions of “a large, old man and a 14-year-old boy” out of Hickson’s life for good. (It’s unclear how he knew the younger ghost’s age.) Hickson doesn’t care how old the ghosts are or were—she’s just glad they’re gone. “It was like I was dead inside, but now, my eyes are sparkling, my spirit is back, I look around and all I see is color.”

HIGH SPIRITS

In August 2018, a budtender named Andy Gomez was working at Five Zero Trees, a marijuana dispensary in Oregon City, Oregon, when, “I kind of felt like someone was standing next to me,” he told Portland’s KGW8 News, “like somebody was right here.” Just then a glass jar fell off the counter and landed on the floor. A bit freaked out, Gomez checked the pot shop’s surveillance footage, and it very clearly showed the jar sliding off the counter…all by itself. “It’s like, what’s going to happen next?” Gomez asked no one in particular. But that wasn’t the only strange occurrence. On another day, at another counter, surveillance footage showed some pens rearranging themselves in a cup. “Those are state-certified videos,” asserted general manager Samantha Davidson, adding that it’s actually illegal to doctor them. Did some prankster break the law? Davidson believes the activity is caused by the ghost of a pharmacist who dispensed medicine in that same building a century ago. “I just hope that the pharmacist is happy we’re here.” She thinks he’s “organizing the counter.” At the conclusion of the story, one of the local newscasters offered up a different theory: “Maybe the ghost just wanted to roll up a big fatty.”

THE SCREAMING GHOSTS OF CLIFTON HALL

After investing in nursing homes and running a hotel in Dubai, by the time Anwar Rashid was 32 years old, he was a millionaire. In 2007 he moved his young family into Clifton Hall, a 900-year-old mansion in Nottinghamshire, England. On the first night, they heard mysterious knocking sounds and then a disembodied voice asking, “Hello, is anyone there?” Over the next few months, Rashid said that more strange things occurred—screams in the night, ghostly children watching TV, and other stereotypical haunted manifestations. Rashid did some research and discovered that Clifton Hall has had a sordid history: a “woman in white” jumped from one of the upstairs windows to her death, and the tunnels underneath the house were once used for satanic rituals.

Rashid called in the Ashfield Paranormal Investigation Network. The lead investigator, an active-duty police officer named Lee Roberts, said it was “the only place where I’ve ever really been scared, even in the light. It’s just got a really eerie feeling about it.” The team said they saw the apparition of a boy, but they were unable to rid the mansion of ghosts.

A comet has an atmosphere, and it’s called a “coma.”

The final straw came when Rashid discovered spots of blood on his baby’s quilt. The next day, only eight months after moving in, the Rashids moved out. “Clifton Hall is a beautiful property—I fell for its beauty,” he told the Telegraph. “But behind the facade it is haunted. We were like the family in The Others. The ghosts didn’t want us to be there.”

Update: A few months after Rashid’s ghost story made national news, he filed for bankruptcy, and then the truth came out. Turns out he isn’t worth nearly as much as he said he was, and he’d been accused of scamming people in the past. It now seems likely that he made up the entire haunting thing because he had a case of buyer’s remorse.

THE HAUNTED DVD

One day in 2009, a movie studio executive was given a DVD of a new low-budget horror movie to see if he’d be interested in distributing it to theaters. He watched the video at home that night and it reportedly “scared the hell out of him.” Even scarier, right after the movie ended, he discovered the door to his room was locked from the outside, and he had to call a locksmith to get out. The executive was so convinced the DVD was haunted that he had to get it out of his house. He brought it to the studio the next day in a trash bag. In the end, he did decide to distribute and market the film. Good idea. It was the found-footage ghost story Paranormal Activity. Made for only $15,000, it went on to become one of the most profitable movies of all time. And the DreamWorks executive who to this day is still convinced that his DVD was haunted: Steven Spielberg.

BOO-NUS FACT

A study performed at Wright State University in Ohio in 2003 looked at 100 homes that were “psychologically impacted” (it’s tough for actual scientists to use the word “haunted”). Their results were a bit spooky: It will take twice as long to sell a haunted house as it will to sell a non-haunted house and, on average, it will sell for about 2.4 percent less.

“I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?”

—John Lennon

Unicorns are mentioned in the Bible nine times.