Resisting the Haunt: Personal Anecdotes of FRIGHT
Jeremy P. Goes Ghost Hunting
starring Jeremy P
This past summer, I went to St. Augustine, Florida, for a few days. Most of the time was spent eating my way through Florida, but one evening the people I was staying with wanted to go on a guided ghost tour of the St. Augustine Lighthouse – a place that is famously haunted, to the extent that Ghost Hunters went there and filmed a shadowy figure inside the lighthouse. I’m not normally really into this sort of thing, but I was on vacation and I was promised we would get a few drinks afterwards. At the very least, it was something I could say I did on vacation that wasn’t illegal or “sitting inside playing my DS” for a change.
The tour started at sundown, so that it was dark and spooky, since ghosts only come out at night. The tour itself wasn’t bad, it was mainly a collection of stories about people who died there or things people saw and reported. The first hour or so was spent with the entire group going from room to room in the Keeper’s House and then climbing up the stairs of the lighthouse to the top. It was standard ghost story fare—you know “sometimes you can hear people walking on the first floor while you are in the basement, even though there’s nobody there!” sort of stuff. The tour gave out those handheld EMF readers or some such “ghost hunting” device, and we all oohed and aahed watching a meter flick around seemingly at nothing. I don’t know the science behind how they actually work or what they are measuring—but at 11:00 pm in an old quiet building they obviously measure ghost activity.
Lit by GHOST POWER.
Much like how any poker room in Atlantic City is now filled with dicks who watch poker on TV and are now masters of the game (for 2 or 3 hands when they blow their money by bluffing with a 2-8 offsuit hand), the problem with shows like Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures, Ghostquest Ghostastrophe, etc., is that now there are loads of independent ghost hunting groups all over the place, and they flock to events such as these. Admittedly people have been paranormal investigators for centuries, but now it seems that the crazy people that always latch onto whatever fringe element will annoy people the most have decided that they are all ghost hunters. There was a group of these nutbags at our tour.
First off, they showed up with their own heat sensing cameras and audio recording equipment, which is obnoxious but just to the level of public mockery. Also, trying to capture anything interesting while being jammed into a room with 40 people is probably impossible. However, this same group had a far more annoying ghost hunting tool – a 16 or 17 year old girl who was supposedly attuned to the paranormal. So now, along with bringing in their camera crew and some douche with a giant microphone who would glare at you when you as much as cleared your throat, this 17 year old girl would interrupt the tour the whole time to ask things based on feelings she had like “I can sense that someone died here,” which is a remarkable statement to make since 30 seconds prior we just heard a story about how someone died there.
This is representative of every haunted tour ever.
I finally hit my breaking point with the Ghost Molesters when, during a story about a man who used to work there named Christopher Thompson (or something like that—I didn’t take notes, people) who used to sit in this spooky chair here, the 17 year old girl stood up in the center of the group and said, “I think he just spoke to me – he said his mother used to call him Chris.” Fuck you, there is no way that a 100+year old spirit decided to use his ghostly powers to speak through you and tell you his mother’s less-than-clever nickname for him. If Christopher Thompson’s ghost really was there, I’m sure he was sitting in that chair with his face in the palm of his hand just laughing . Thankfully the guided tour portion of the evening was over, so I made sure to spend as little time as possible around that group for the next hour – the free-roaming session.
After the tour ended we were allowed to wander the grounds by ourselves in the dark, just sort of watching our magical ghost-o-meters and asking questions out loud as if you expected to get an answer from the afterlife about tomorrow’s Lucky Pick 5 or whatever it is you are asking. Since the Ghost Molesters were in the basement I decided that I would roam outside in the woods near the Lighthouse. That’s when I heard voices.
Like I said before, I’m not usually into this stuff, so it’s not like I was out there trying to find something. But as I was walking through an unlit path in the woods, I started hearing whispers. I assumed at first it must have been some other visitors roaming in the woods to avoid the annoying 17 year old in the basement, but still… I didn’t see anyone, and I didn’t hear people walking or really any more noise other than faint whispering. I had my digital camera with me, so I took a flash photo and looked at it. Just a path, nothing there. So I took a few steps forward, aimed the same place, took another photo and… now there’s a weird white blur in the middle of the photo, sort of near the ground, but it was something I should have seen in the first photo but didn’t.
WH-WHA-WHAAAT?!
Normally if you showed me a photo with a weird white blur in it as proof of a ghost, I would think you were a lunatic. Even roughly 5 minutes after I took it, I thought I was probably just being a giant sissy. But at the time, it was horrifying. I was frozen in place, staring at the photo and then into the darkness where the smudge would be. The hair on my arms stood on end, and I couldn’t do anything other than turn and run back to my group as fast as I could.
After getting back and showing everyone the “ghost” photo, we all went out to the area, and couldn’t find anything that really could have been that blur. The voices were more obvious now though, it was people from the top of the lighthouse, their voices barely heard from far below. Thinking about it now, that blur could have been a bird, it might even just have been leaves or something… but it was one of the few times I’ve ever been too scared to rationalize. Do I believe in ghosts now? No… but I also can’t say I don’t believe in them anymore.
A Haunting or a Case of Carbon Monoxide Poisoning? YOU Decide!
Starring Amanda
It is widely known that I am some sort of fraidy cat in all aspects of my life, and also that I have a wildly out of control imagination. Even though these two things are the truest things about me, I have still managed to not really ever have any “ghostly encounters.” I have heard of plenty of other people’s experiences, and I don’t really disbelieve them. When it comes down to it, I am not certain enough about reality to say for sure that no, of course ghosts don’t exist. I am not that kind of person who would ever be comfortable being so certain about ANYTHING. This might be because I am a little scared that if I say that I am absolutely 100% sure about something not existing, then it will probably wind up happening and blow my mind/cause mental insanity. And no please.
I have had plenty of experiences of being freaked out when I am alone. My parents’ house is large and deep in a creepy forest, and when you are by yourself there, so many noises start happening and you get cold and terrified and afraid to notice anything in your peripheral vision. Other family members have apparently seen an apparition, in whole or in part, of a strange man who is dressed like some sort of forgotten man from the Depression era. And in fact, there was some research done, and a wandering fellow was killed in a hit and run on a road very close to our house in the Thirties, so of course now everyone is like, “well it is a traveling ghost, still homeless, eternally, so he isn’t here ALL the time – he just visits.” I have never seen him and you can bet that I never want to, but a few of my normally-sane relatives have been scared to pieces from “seeing a man” who then “suddenly was not there.” Yikes.
Hey this is where I grew up!
Besides finding a place to “feel creepy” or being unnerved for reasons unknown, I have not really had much paranormal experience. However, there was this time.. My boyfriend was living in a fairly shabby shotgun-style house in Covington, KY, which is right across the river from Cincinnati and would just be the south side of Cincinnati, OH, if it weren’t in a different state, okay? I just don’t want you thinking it was on a mountain top and surrounded by hill folk. But this house was built in the 1800s and could easily have been a crack house. It probably was before. There were no doors or hallways, no privacy at all, the kitchen and bathroom were CARPETED (scariest part of my story, imo), there were no screens in any of the windows, and there was a terrifying additional room built off of the kitchen. I rarely went into that back room, as it reminded me of a bad story from one of those scary books targeted to children which then traumatize them for the rest of their lives.
This house was a real piece of work. He and his two room mates moved in during a December, I believe it was. And the furnace would frequently rumble and break, plunging us all into harrowing sub-freezing evenings where we would drink for warmth and sanity, and try not to feel sad that we could see our breath very plainly while we were sitting on a couch. The house didn’t waste any time in scaring any of us. The very first morning after they moved their things in, they discovered what can only be described as a slime trail that came from one heat register, circled around all of their belongings several times, and exited the room through the register on the other side of the room. It was described as a very soft powder if you touched it, after it had dried. I was told that it looked like a very fast slug that was about two inches wide and who knows how long decided to snoop amongst their things. We were horrified, but did not really start saying “ectoplasm” until later.
This is a scene from Covington. It all pretty much looks this old and spooky everywhere you look.
Everyone in that house started having nightmares. Those strange nightmares where you cannot tell if you are awake or dreaming, and then you are shot in the stomach with a shotgun at close range, or you murder your room mates and have to run from the cops, or a thousand snakes pour out from your ceiling while you are lying in bed. Then you wake up for sure. OR DO YOU?? One guy even had a dream, while he was laying on the couch that was in line with all of the doorways, which he was actually doing. But he fell asleep without realizing it, and then, in the dream, detected a presence. So he sat up and looked down the house to the end room (which was his bedroom). Sitting on the floor of his room was a man dressed in his clothes, seated Indian-style, and with a deer skull in place of his real head. As our friend looked on in horror, registering what he was seeing, the figure stood up and started sprinting STRAIGHT AT HIM. Of course, our friend flailed and fell off the couch, and then woke up for real. He spent the rest of the day walking around outside until it was time for his room mates to come home from work, apparently. It was stressful to stay in that house alone, even in broad daylight. The same guy reported that he heard heavy footsteps all the time, always running at him, but then no one could be seen. I was there alone for a half an hour at eleven at night once and I just concentrated very hard on the television screen while it felt like someone stared at the side of my head, very menacingly.
The boyfriend and I had a little sheet fort that we used in his room as a place to sleep, because we are elegant. And one night, one rare night, we were the only people in the house. It was normally crowded with visitors and friends, all drunk, and all usually embroiled in dramatically violent scenes of fisticuffs. I kind of got the feeling that the HOUSE caused everyone to fight and spill blood everywhere. Oh so creepy. Anyway, as we were about to fall asleep, lights all off, all alone together, we heard a voice. It spoke one word – either “Dan” (what the boyfriend thought) or “Damn!” (which is what I heard). The voice was a whisper, but loud enough that it was heard rather clearly. We each originally hoped that the other had said something, but we knew better. We had goosebumps and acknowledged that the voice certainly could be placed within two feet of the outside of our sheet wall.
We sprang into action. All the lights were turned on, we looked outside to see if anyone was out there trying to prank us or something. Even though it was February and all of the windows were closed and yeah there were just all kinds of reasons that it wouldn’t have been a mistaken moment from the outside. There had been a voice, and I have no idea why it would have been saying either of those things.
This is not the house, but it IS a house in Covington that we did consider renting. I bet I would have a lot better ghost stories if we had.
Later, my mom told us that there was some custom of bringing houseplants to remind the dead that they are in the spirit world and to move on, so we brought in a few plants and sat them on a sturdy shelf. That very evening, that entire shelf was knocked over, plants scattered across the room, dirt everywhere. This happened when no one was in the room! A few nights later, the two other room mates reported, from different ends of the house, that the entire house flooded with light for one second. A bright flash like strong lightning, except that it was not storming, and the light certainly was inside of the house, like all the lights turned on at the same time, except that of course they did not. After that, the house was no longer creepy, and also Spring arrived.
A few years later, the room mate who had the terrifying skull dream moved back into that house with his new family (the rent was very agreeable, you see). It was not scary, but their child kept getting sick. At some point, the furnace broke again, or they could smell a gas leak or something, but they called the gas company to send a man out to check on things. He had one of those carbon monoxide detectors with him, and when he walked into the kitchen, it started saying that the carbon monoxide was at unhealthy levels. As he walked from room to room, the levels kept increasing and increasing. There are only five or six rooms in that house, all in a row, at an angle because that house sure did slope, and after the third room, the man turned to them and told them that they HAD to leave. The carbon monoxide levels were so high that he was not legally allowed to let them stay there even one more night. The landlords had to finally fix that furnace the safe and legal way, and miraculously our friend’s daughter was no longer constantly sick.
But it does kind of make you wonder. If we were being slowly poisoned with carbon monoxide, which is very possible, why would we have had shared hallucinations? Bad dreams and paranoid thoughts and solitary visions are one thing, but the fact that some of us saw things, the same things, together – well, that’s a little harder for me to laugh off as just us being slowly put to death by a furnace’s fumes. Or maybe the g-g-ghost kept tampering with the furnace so that we would DIE eventually?? Or it was probably built on an Indian burial ground, but man, those places are everywhere, aren’t they?
