VISITOR'S GHOST STORIES

"Between the world we see and the things we fear, there are doors. When they are opened, nightmares become reality." - A haunting, 2005

Have a chilling tale you'd like to share?  Perhaps an experience with ghosts you'd like to write about?  This section is reserved just for you, our visitor's, to share your own experiences told in your own words.  If you have a story and would like to share it, please feel free to send it to us and we'll be happy to publish it here as we received it and unedited; confidentiality is absolutely guaranteed!  Please keep in mind this is a youth accessible web site, thank you.  

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Halloween at Fort Adams, Newport, RI

Hello,

My sister, Hope, and I visited Fort Adams and were part of the Ghost Tour on Halloween night during the last tour of the evening.  We both found it very interesting.  I brought a voice recorder.  It was interesting to have people taking photos and seeing orbs and such.  During the tour where the group listens to EVPs I had asked a question if they smoke cigarettes or chew tobacco.  We all move on to the rest of the tour.  It was pretty chilly and Hope and I were glad to get back to the car and get the heat going.  I smoke and lit a cigarette up.  It was around that time that I started to get a feeling that someone was in the car.  I am driving and we are now completely out of the parking lot and the feeling is still with me.  I say out loud, “I do not have any cigarettes”.  This spooks my sister and I down play it.  It is around this time that my interior car light turns on.  I slow down to a stop, my sister and I just look at each other and giggle nervously and I say “you cannot come with us”, “you have to leave now”.  We began to drive again and we got to the first stop sign before the feeling started to fade.

 ISincerely,

 Karen Diggle

 

It's hard to say when I experienced my first true haunting.  It seems such things have been part of my life as far back as I can remember.  Where most children had "invisible friends" to talk to and play with, I would chat with people that were once as vibrant and full of life as I was and although had long since left their human shell behind still had a lot to say to those that would listen.  It was and still is something I find as natural as anything else in life.  As best I can remember, it was my grandmother that encouraged me in my gift. despite my parents' objections.

On one particular afternoon, I was eighteen and was staying at my grandmother's house while I went to college.  We both knew she wasn't long for this world, she was tired.  I had just checked on her and closed the bedroom door when I suddenly caught the aroma of a cigar coming from the nearby living room. My grandmother did smoke cigars, so I thought she had forgotten to put one out again.  I walked into the room to see a handsome, middle aged man looking out the large picture window.  He looked just like anyone else, yet the chilled air and an all-too-familiar feeling told me this was a ghost. I knew this man by the portrait hanging on the wall just feet away.  He had died many years before I was even born in the Korean War, yet there was a connection to this man I felt every time I looked at his portrait.

My grandfather turned to me, saying, "You haven't changed at all, Kel!  I've come to take you home..."

Kelly was my grandmother's nickname and I never heard anyone ever call her Kel.  I replied I was Janet and Kelly was my grandmother. His face grew suddenly sad, as if it the years in his world go by unnoticed, and he stepped toward the window and faded away.

I hurried back to the bedroom, where I found my grandmother lying awake and smiling at me. She looked at me and asked me to sit on the bed beside her.  "You saw him, your Grandfather..."  For hours we talked while she showed me old photographs she had from her much younger days.  It was rather uncanny to see how much her and I looked alike.  She asked me to lay with her for a while she slept...I knew better and gladly agreed.

My grandmother died that night, peacefully and with a smile on her face that told me they were again reunited.  I still live in the house she left me and every now and then I'll sense her being there, checking in. on things. I'll be opening my veterinary practice there next year.

Ghosts still visit me and occasionally I have a visit from something more and I have to deal with it accordingly.  But nothing will ever compare to what I experienced that afternoon and I'm not anxious to either.  

(Name and address withheld by request)

 

"...the reality of it..."

I watch shows like A Haunting, Ghosthunters, Ghost Adventures…you know the genre, and I just laugh when I’m asked why doesn’t that stuff doesn't scare me.  The answer is simple but by no means an eassy or even accepable subject, in many cases, to talk to people about.  I lived in a haunted house, the real thing, much like the ones I chatted with your group about after a lecture at Brown University in 2008. 

The story goes like this.  When I was a child growing up in Coventry, Rhode Island, we lived in an old house on Hokney Hill Road that to this day is still being occupied and from what people say, are going through the same things we did.  The house was formerly an asylum for women in the late 1890s to early 1930s run by the local ministry.  It was not a pleasant place at all and abuse on every level of its inmates was like other asylums of the day, commonplace regardless of age or sex.  The few photographs from the era taken at these institutions depicting clean gowns and facilities were to appease the public’s conscience and far from the reality of the horror faced by the poor people committed there.  

Although the house had earned a dark reputation after the asylum closed, the house and land by the lake was quite beautiful and, in my opinion, still is.  Even before they it was fashionable, the house boasted a large islanded kitchen and a huge stone fireplace on both the first and second floors.  The rooms were spacious and plentiful for young family to grow in, or so my parents thought.  My bedroom was on the second floor at the end of the hallway and my two older sisters occupied the ones before it respectfully.  My parents’ bedroom was on the first floor.  In the cellar the foundation was stone and somewhere we, my sisters and I, avoided like the plague. As far back as I can remember the basement was a place no power on Earth could make us go down into without my father or mother going with us.  The atmosphere down there was thick with a “force” that quickly made you feel frightened and unwelcome and although he would act otherwise my father disliked it down there as well.

 The smell of alcohol and other antiseptics was common and I guess we just got used to it although my mother only used Lysol and Spic and Span.  No liquor or tobacco was allowed in the house whatsoever, yet there was occasionally the distinct odor of both in the upper “living room” and sometimes in the first floor spare rooms as well.  These are things people can live with, but not the whispers, giggling, crying and so many other manifestations my sisters and I were forced to endure.  Complaining to my hardcore Baptist parents did little to help the situation. They did all they could to downplay the rumor mills about the house being “off.”

As my sisters married I inherited the top floor, a pretty nice deal for a High School teen needing her privacy.  The ghosts had become something I accepted and pretty much ignore. But I had no idea that when Jeannie moved out things was going to get bad.

About a month after Jennie’s wedding I was alone in the house.  My parents were away for the night at friends and I was enjoying a night of quiet and reading.   It was getting late and I didn’t expect my parents in until even later, especially if the bridge game was going their way.  I walked the first floor, keeping my promise to making sure the windows were locked and doors were bolted before going to bed.  It seemed I had just laid down when I head someone shuffling down the hallway.  I remember rolling my eyes and thinking, “Oh wonderful, here we go…” when the sound stopped just short of my closed bedroom door.  The silence that filled the house was unnerving as I strained to listen for any further noises.  As a rule, it was usually over as fast as it began, but this night it was only the overture.  I swear my heart skipped a few beats as I heard my bedroom door’s doorknob being turned and suddenly being released.  The spring action of the mechanism was strong on my door and nothing that could move unless physically made to do so.  Nonetheless I listened to the swish of my door suddenly opening and then the room fell silent.  It became unbelievably cold to the point I shivered when just moments before it was warm but comfortable. That’s when I felt the unmistakable feeling that I was being stared at.  I sneaked a peak from beneath my sheet and there, standing in my doorway, was a wretch of a woman with long gray hair and dressed in a dirty Johnny-like gown.  I immediately screamed and pressed myself against the head broad and wall.  The more I screamed the closer the woman came to me and the colder I became.

 I had no idea that while all this was happening my parents had come home and were at the front door.  Probably unglued by my screams (Geez, you think??) I heard the crash of the back door downstairs and my mom and dad’s running feet.  I heard my dad calling me but all I could do was shut my eyes, scream and almost soil myself.  I was terrified.  I suddenly felt two strong hands grabbing me and I freaked out even more, only to open my eyes and see I was in my fathers arms trembling. 

 I told him and my mother what happened. I prepared myself for the usual battery of attempts to explain it away but I was in for a surprise. I was shocked as my father quickly began a search of the house and my mother sat with me trying to get me to clam down.  I distinctly remember him saying to my mom, “Someone or something scared Tam nearly to death.  I have to be sure that no one broke in!” I felt my mother shiver.  She caught my father's slip as well and it made the event all the more frightening to hear my logical father admit to a "something" after all these years.  After what happened I refused to return to my room and insisted I spend that night in the guest bedroom downstairs.  Again, I was shocked by my parents’ lack of argument and unexpected quick agreement.  I didn’t sleep and of course I demanded that the lights be left on.  I could hear my parents’ quiet but heated discussion on what to do next and I remember hearing my mother’s words, “Enough is enough, this is getting out of hand now!”  To this day I believe my mother secretly believed in our ghosts as well and took a mothers concern for her child's welfare for it to come forward.

From that night on, I never set foot upstairs again.  My father moved my belongings into the guest room and that was that. He made it clear the subject was not to be spoken about again. Things were never right between us and the house after that.  I found out from a friend and then our neighborhood gosip that our minister had come to the house, assumedly bless the house.  Coventry was a small town then and little went on that everyone didn't know about by supper that night.  A huge fight ensued between my mother and father.   This is regardless of the fact we would be eating supper and would hear a sound like shuffling or sometimes soft footsteps upstairs.  My father was proud, but he could see how it was affecting the family and a month later even he had had enough.  We sold the house at such a bargain it sold quickly and we moved to Putnam, Connecticut shortly after my graduation.  It’s my understanding the man who most recently bought the property rents house...often.

I now live back in Rhode Island and  although its been a lifetime since I left that house for good, I cannot help but wonder if the house is still haunted and if those living are facing the same terror I did living there.  It sends chills through me to think someone going through what I and my family did so many years ago.  All I know is I know what it means to be haunted and scared beyond your senses. There’s nothing that can prepare a person for something like that, that's the reality of it, but I can say this.  The snickers and snide remarks about haunted houses and ghosts fade quickly when it happens to those laughing now.  Its a sobering thing to suddenly be faced by what's hidden out there.

(Personal information withheld at submitter’s request

Haunted Vermont Cabin

I was seventeen I was never a believer in the supernatural as far as ghosts are concerned.  That all changed when my uncle and my father invited me to join them on a hunting weekend in Vermont in a cabin he and my dad had reserved there.  I was excited, seeing this was something only they had done alone for years.  A scheduling snafu forced them to make arrangements with a new cabin owner, but still a great weekend was planned by all.
 
We arrived at the cabin late Friday afternoon and the snow that wasn't due until the following day was already falling when we got there, so that meant we had a lot to do before getting to bed that night as far as wood cutting and getting our gear ready for the next morning.  I was busy being the pack mule when the cabin owner met us there with the keys and struck up a conversation with my dad and uncle.  All I could make out however was my dad asking not to mention "it" to me.  Of course, after dinner I couldn't help but start in on them about what the owner had said that made my dad say what he did. They both laughed saying he had been alone in the woods for too long.  I insisted though and they finally gave in, saying that he warned them the place had a reputation for being haunted.  I immediately laughed, much to my father and uncle's relief and replied I was too old for ghost stories.  It was on that note, anticipating an exhausting day ahead, that I wished them both a good night.  I was privileged to be given the only real bed in the place while they got roll-always. 
 
Hours passed when I was awoken suddenly by what I can only describe as being physically shaken from my sleep.  I propped up my head and looked around the open floor style cabin, noting the wood in the stoked fireplace was crackling loudly and reasoning it must have been that and the excitement of being there that woke me up. There was the slight odor of my father's cigar smoke still lingering in the air and the urge to have a late night smoke came over me.  I walked to the table where a half finished checkers game sat beside several empty, semi-crushed beer cans.  As I lit the cigarette, I looked at the occasional reflection of large snowflakes just outside the nearby window.  I walked over to it, noticing the cold as I neared the glass and that I could not hear the wind whipping around outside.  I began fantasizing about being snowbound for weeks there when I saw the unmistakable glow of a lantern shining through the mix of  darkness and swirling squalls of snow.  I looked at my watch and asked myself who the hell would be out in such a storm at three o'clock in the morning.  I no sooner looked back and I saw the glow slowly fade into the forest beyond.
 
The next morning at breakfast, I mentioned what I saw and my uncle snickered that it was probably one of the locals poaching.  It was a reasonable thing to assume since the local residents did take game at their leisure and so the conversation ended.  The following hours made the eight hour trip the afternoon before all worth while and before I realized it the day was ending and I was resting my aching feet and legs next to the fire.  I don't even remember if I finished my supper or not before crawling into my bed and passing out from shear exhaustion.
 
I was in mid-dream when I was awoken again and heard the distinctive sound of a floorboard creaking loudly not far from where I was sleeping.  I sat up on my elbows and from where I slept I had a good view of the entire cabin.  I strained to see through the low light but couldn't make out anyone or thing.  The sound of my father stirring in his bed as well made the situation a little less tense as I hoped he was awake now too.  But as my dad and uncle's snoring resumed I knew I was the only one up. I swallowed my heart out of my throat as I heard the sound of the cabin door opening, yet the cabin remained warm and there was no glow from outside from the full moon.  I attempted to shine my flashlight around the cabin but the batteries were curiously dead.  My heart pounded in my ears, yet  I could hear footsteps slowly making their way across the wooden floors...I was genuinely scared at this point.  My rifle was cleaned and in its case against the far wall, for what good it would have done me anyway, and I was amazed my father and uncle had not awakened to all the commotion.  I remember actually shaking  as the footsteps stopped just feet from my bed and I could hear the distinctive sound of a man's steady but loud, labored breathing.  The air around me became freezing as if someone had suddenly placed me outside and then back again.  I was about to let out a scream when it all stopped as suddenly as it began.  The fire's crackling resumed along with the other two's snoring. I laid back down, shaking until I finally convinced myself an hour later that it was only a nightmare.
 
The following day we packed up and it was a long subdued drive back home.  For my father and uncle because they had not gotten their shot and for me because the night before still haunted me.  It would not be until my graduation from high school several months later that I drove back to the area where the cabin was and did some investigating.  It didn't take me long before I was sitting in the town's small library reading old newspapers.  There it was, a picture of the cabin and the headline right on the front page and a story that explained it all too well.  The cabin belonged to the brother of the man that leased it to us that weekend.  The brother had been found shot in the chest and dead in his bed when he failed to show up at a family function.  Despite pressure to pursue the case by the man's family, lack of details and evidence to the contrary forced the local authorities to declared the death an accidental suicide.
 
Its been thirty four years and that night is still firmly clear in my mind.  I decided to return to the cabin just last year only to find out the place had been abandoned a long ago and been left to the elements ever since.  I was tempted to disregard the old and rusted no trespassing signs and go in, but decided to drive away and leave whatever ghosts reside there in peace.  I do not know the circumstances of the what really happened to the original owner, but I do pray that he has finally found peace.
   
(Name with held by request)
Worcester, Mass.

Haunted RI University

Haunted house stories and alike have always bothers me since my college days when I was dormed in an old mansion in Newport, RI. 
 
The Cary Mansion was the house pictures in the old television show Dark Shadows...a creepy soap and now a cult classic about a vampire and the generations of his family that lived in an old creepy mansion.  Being a huge fan of this show, I was excited to me among the first student to dorm in the old mansion when Salve Regina University acquired it to be used as dorm rooms. 
 
Almost right from the start strange things were happening to us, mostly after hours when the building quieted down for the night.  There would be knocking on the doors, sounds of gowns rustling coming and going down hallways and even the occasional distinctive sound of a weeping woman that few that stayed there could deny hearing either in their rooms or just outside their room doorways.  Despite numerous attempts to bring an end to what the administration officially called pranks, the hauntings continued.  In time we all got used to the weird happenings, at least outwardly and few ever public talked about it as requested by the school's powers-that-be. 
 
The rumors about the university could not be stopped, however, and they continue today...just ask anyone that has stayed in the old mansion for more than a night and they will have  tale for you.  As for the official cover-up that the old mansion is truly haunted, I am told by students staying there today, one of them my own daughter, that the Carey Mansion is still very much haunted...off-the-record of course. 
 

(Name with held by request)

Boston, Mass.

The Boogey Man

When I was a child I was convinced that my house's basement was haunted.  I never saw anything, but more than once I felt something down there staring at me.  I know I even heard a voice coming from my father's workshop area.  It wasn't a friendly voice and I would be lying if I said I couldn't even be sure if it sounded human.
 
My mother saw it as an evasion from my chores...one of which was laundry and would get upset with of my carrying on, as she called it, and my refusing to go down into the basement.  Even after being threatened with punishment or no supper I gladly made the trade and this never made sense to her. 
 
I was late coming home from school one particular day, I got involved in some serious card flipping and this, my mother insisted, was not the activity for young ladies.  Little did she or I realize that some day that four of those cards I won that day would help pay my tuition in ten years. I  knew the best way to appease my mother's anger was to walk straight into the house and start my homework.  Usually there was food being prepared or something going on in the kitchen but on that day it was still clean and untouched.  I could hear my mother's voice coming from the nearby parlor as well as her best friend Mary Francisco.  I could tell something wasn't quite right.
 
I quickly answered my mother's call into the room...another thing that never happened and now I knew something was very wrong.  On the table was an opened bottle of my father's bourbon and a single half filled glass sitting on the coffee table in front of my mother.  I immediately spotted my mother's rosary gripped in her white knuckled hands.  She looked at me and I could see she had been crying.   With as much composure as she could muster, my mother announced I was not to go downstairs alone anymore and the matter was not to be spoken of again.
 
From that day until our house got badly damaged in a bad lightning storm two years I was never alone down there again.  When the house got hit and we eventually had to move I was never happier and, secretly, I knew my mother was too.
 
As I was told, my mother would insure that the matter was never spoken of again.  The bits and pieces I picked up from slips she made and the conversations I wasn't supposed to overhear over the years allowed me to I figure out for myself that something had seriously scared my mother in the basement of our old house.  In the years after Father died the newer home he and mother had bought took on some changes.  One of the more chilling changes was my mother's instance that a deadbolt be placed on the door to the cellar.  To my knowledge, she never set foot past that door and she would never ask me to either.
 
Do I believe in the Boogey Man?  You bet I do!
 
Connie R.
Tulsa, OK

"Lesson Learned!"

On a warm summer night while staying over a friend's house for the weekend, she and I decided to take a late night trip to Fort Wetherill in Newport, RI.  Being from New Haven and a huge ghost story fan, I was eager to check out this place both her and I had heard from many other people who swore was haunted...some warned us to stay away from there because of bad karma.
 
The fort is actually several abandoned artillery bunkers, I was told by a mutual friend at school (we both go to Brown University) on our drive there, that were once connected by underground tunnels.  The location of these tunnels have long since been lost to time, but still the remaining bastions still give the visitor a taste of what the fort must have been like while it was in use.  In a word, Creepy!
 
We had decided to check out the main set of bunkers directly south of the park.  The night was foggy and very humid and infested with mosquitoes, but still we made it to the bunkers.  It was as we stepped into the first doorway that the deafening chorus of thousands of toads and crickets suddenly stopped.  A chill slipped up my spine and right away I knew that I might have made a smarter choice for that night's entertainment.   Our flashlights had been charged with brand new fresh batteries and yet they were dimming quickly after only an hour in the darkness of the fort's maze of rooms and connecting hallways.   It wasn't long before we were standing darkness so intense that we couldn't see our hands in front of our faces.  Cheryl grabbled my arm and pleaded for us to leave as we heard what we both knew as a woman's muffled cry.  We stopped and listened and sure enough it came back again, but this time it was closer.  Our legs and arms suddenly became freezing cold and the flashlight in my hand blinked as it strained to come back on. I forced myself to take a picture with this supermarket 35mm I bought on the way there.  We discovered the flashes gave us enough light to get out of the fort and to the safety of the fields outside.  We held each other tight as we walked back to the car just as the toads and crickets started up again.  Cheryl was so shaken that she couldn't drive and I can't drive a stick.  So we waited to calm down...an hour later we left.
 
Two weeks passed and I went over Cheryl's house with the pictures I took.  What we saw was nothing less than phenomenal!  A cloud was swirling around us at the time we were freezing and there's a face right in the middle of it of a woman.  Other pictures captured what we think might be orbs, but the most disturbing picture is the one with two mean looking red eyes looking at us from down the end of a hallway.  My skin crawled and still does when I looked at this photo.
 
For weeks strange stuff kept happening to both of us...bad luck, things going missing, arguments with our boyfriends over stupid things.  I finally saw a psychic friend of my mother's and she said that we had brought something back with us that night by means of those pictures.  Just as a ghost or spirit can be trapped in a mirror, she said, they can be trapped in a photograph as well.  As soon as I got home I burned every picture I had taken that night and that seemed to put an end to my string of uncanny bad luck.
 
All I know is that I'll be leaving the investigating to you people from now on and settle for the armchair variety from here on in.   I used to laugh at your advise about cleansing before and after you go into these places...I'm not laughing anymore.
 
Lesson learned!

(Information withheld by request)

Mariah

As incredible as this story is going to sound to anyone that reads it, I assure you that it really happened.
 
My brother and I lived and grew up in the then sparsely populated town of Killingly, Connecticut; a small town sitting on the Connecticut and Rhode Island border.  The woods throughout this area are still quite thick and its easy for a person to get turned around in and lost.  What made things worse was and still is the endless acres of thick, skin shredding bull briar.  But for those that knew the trick to finding their way around these hazards, it afforded an excellent place for two growing kids to have fun in.  I was my brother's younger sister by a year, but there wasn't anything he did that I didn't do.
 
In the summer of 1972, Russel, 13, and myself, 12, decided to hike to the trout stream that ran from a nearby pond and through the heart of the woods I just described.  It was a favorite fishing spot and we had gone there many times.  So our mother didn't think twice about allowing us to go alone and it got us from underfoot as well.  In less than a half of an hour we were sitting on our favorite spot, a huge fallen pine that bridged the spot where the stream pooled and where the trout loved to spend the hot summer days catching insects.  Fishing was so good that day, too good.  We had lost track of time and before we knew it the sun was setting. The none rule we had was not to be in the woods after dark and we were in trouble.
 
Grabbing our poles and the fish, we started back down the trail but the dark was coming around us fast as it does in the woods.   Before long, we were inching along using the light from a half moon to walk by.  An hour passed and then two...we were lost.  We should have been able to see our the back porch light of our house by now and  it was nowhere to be seen.
 
It was a frightening thing...not being lost, what was waiting for us when we got home!  We began to argue as to who was the one at fault when we saw a lantern flash about fifty or so yards away. 
 
A hoarse male voice called, "Mariah!!"  
 
We yelled back, but the lantern still slowly made its way away from us.  Russell grabbed me and towed me behind him as we hastily tried to keep pace with the lantern out in front of us. Suddenly it vanished just as we saw a dim light shining through the trees ahead.  
 
As we got nearer, we saw it was our own porch light  and our father and our nearest neighbor, Mr. Kelly, were in the backyard preparing to go look for us.  Our dad saw us and  he yelled out for our Mom.  It was all smiles now, but we knew there was a reckoning coming...or was there.
 
As we sat and ate the trout and told our parents of the adventure we had their anger over our losing track of time seemed to wane.  It was when Russell told them about the lantern, however, and the man calling out for someone that my mother and father suddenly stopped eating, mid-chew, and looked at each other.
 
The atmosphere suddenly turned chilled and I immediately asked what was wrong.  My father snapped back, not angrily but nervously, to stifle and eat my supper.  I pushed for an answer and my father threw his napkin into the dish and stormed into the next room and slams the door behind him.
 
Later that night, as I was getting into bed, I asked my mother what I had done wrong.  My father never spoke like that to me and from that day on never did again.  My mother walked over, closed the bedroom door and sat on the edge of my bed.  She explained that when he and her were just teenage friends growing up in the area, Dad's oldest sister Mariah had disappeared.  They found a shoe she had been wearing in the local woods, but she herself was never found.  My grandfather died three weeks later from pneumonia, still insisting on searching for Mariah.
 
My brother still lives on the family property and although I live in Seattle now, I still call often. During my last call Russell told me he had watched the movie "White Noise" and, urged on by sister-in-law, Meg, decided to place a tape recorder near where we sued to fish as kids. He played it back for me over the phone and my blood suddenly ran cold. Mixed in with the sound of the recorder's whine was a clear male voice calling, "Mariah!"

(Name with held by request)

Seattle, WA

Touch of Poe

My daughter, Brandi, age 14, attends RISD College (Rhode Island School of Design) in Providence, RI. She is gaining as much as she can through certificate programs and hopefully will attend RISD full time after she finishes High School. She had a class on Tuesday, August 2, 2005. During this class, the Instructor, Sondra usually holds class outside and lets the students choose their vicinity for sketching, down by the Water Fire area. I recall, she and I were sending text messages back and forth on her cell phone telling me that she was sketching a squirrel and saying how cute he was. It was just starting to get dark out. I had to pick her up by 9pm, when I did; she couldn’t wait to tell me about this guy.

       “As I was sketching, a man had come and leaned over to see what I was doing. He stayed in that position, the man had short brownish hair, a bit  messed up brow, mustache, white shirt and dark pants on,” she said. He stood there for a good amount of time. You know when you get that really Erie feeling, you can feel some one standing there, just watching.

 “I just couldn’t help it,” she said, “I had to look behind me.” She sat there in complete puzzlement, the man had literally vanished, and she knew he was there, but as she turned to look he was gone!

 “I finally saw a ghost, how cool is that?” she said to me. I was thinking to myself how cool that really was, because we both enjoy the paranormal. Brandi and I reached home and didn’t give any more thoughts about it. On Thursday the 4th, she had another class and this one she stays inside for. I dropped her off, came home and jumped on the internet, looking up haunted buildings at RISD; I came across several buildings that were haunted and a story about a horse and buggy then a man who roams the streets at RISD.

He roams the streets after it gets dark, I guess he had been in love with someone on Wickeden Street, for he was a famous Poet and wrote The Raven for his true love. This gentleman was Edgar Allen Poe. I dowsed my computer screens with his image. I sat there in disbelief. Is it possible for it to have been Poe himself? I do believe in ghosts, but POE? I went and picked her up at usual time, 9pm, and I asked her on the way home to describe this man she had seen on Tuesday. I asked for more details.

“why?” she asked, and I told her, if she can match a description of what I might have, then I will tell her, but I was not giving up any info to help her along. She once again described the man in white shirt and dark pants, mustache, and a bit messed up brow, short, hair. I then asked her to tell me about his face more; she told me that he had like a pear shaped face, which slims down to his chin. I kept looking at her and I was already getting chills. I asked her to just do a kindergarten type drawing to give me a better idea of what she meant by all his features. We walked into the house and Brandi went straight for the computer paper. She did it up, and she looked at me and I had this, “I just scored a gold mine,” look on my face. I turned to the PC and clicked and there stood the man before her eyes. I did do a cut and paste, so the name was not attached. She was flawed. She was sitting there in amazement and saying “Oh my god, that’s him, how did you know that mom?” I told her I kept searching, and found out about a man who roams the streets after dark.  She says again, “Oh My God, it really was a ghost, he was watching me draw, Wowww,” in total amazement. I had to pull up all the other pictures; she saw his image over and over and over, young, and old. She say’s “POE?” Now in total Shock. “Edgar Allen Poe was watching me?”  “YES Brandi, he was!!” I replied to her amazement.

The next day, she kept going over it with me in the kitchen, still in amazement, I must admit, I was pretty damn awed by it myself and wish I could have seen him too. It still hadn’t sunk in either of our heads that it was Poe for real, even though we fully do believe in ghosts. My stepson, Joe walked into the kitchen during our conversation and listened to what were saying. He hadn’t known about what happened, because he had been at work during the course of all this, along with sleeping.  We were telling him the story, and he came out as soon as he heard Poe’s name and stated, “YEA, he walks the streets and he was in love with some lady down there and his favorite hangout is in the park over by the veterans area, there is a tall monument there…and stones that have veterans names in them.”  He had just announced where Brandi had been sitting for her class. She was seated in that very same park.

She wants to go back and see if he’ll come back around and maybe have me snap pictures while she is there sketching, hoping to catch a glimpse of him on film, As he has already inspired us with his poetry.

Dawn McLaughlin & Brandi Martell

North Providence, RI

Cumberland Ghost

We moved into our house about 15 years ago. Just recently we have addition to our garage to increase the size from two bays to four. Once the addition was completed there were strange noises in our house. At night you could hear someone running up the stairs and walking down the upstairs hallway. My dad said this was just the sound of the house settling but its not, it sounds like someone is actually running up the stairs. I have told may people and most do not believe what I was telling them. And my dad, he is the biggest skeptic in the world about ghosts. But one night when he was coming home with my mother, he opened the breeze way door and checked inside the garage to make sure the lights were off. But when he opened the door he stopped dead in his tracks and turned around to my mother who was standing behind him and told her that there was a little boy on the landing. Now in our garage there are stairs that go up and stop at a landing and there is a door to the breeze way. He described the boy as a young boy may be 8 or 9 years of age, wearing like farmer’s overalls and a baseball cap. Now I did not believe him at first but he swears that he saw it and my mom swears he did because of the look he gave her. Now that may sound strange but listen to this. A few weeks later my brother who is 10 is up in his room. It is like 12:00 at night I’m watching TV downstairs and all of a sudden I hear him crying. So my mom goes and sees him, he tells my mom that he was just lying in bed and he was looking at his wall. Then all of a sudden a figured formed in front of him. He said it was a lady in a white working dress with a large straw hat and a basket. He said she looked like she was picking grapes from the air. Then when he started to cry it looked at him and then see disappeared. Now at first I did not believe him because he is 10 years old and the incident with my father might have just sparked a little interest in him and maybe he just wanted some attention. But like before my mom swears he is telling the truth because of his face. Now I don’t know if the sightings were true but I do know that I hear the footsteps almost every night. Now at first I was scared but now I guess I have just gotten use to them. Now when I tell people these things they believe that we might have dug up bodies or something when we added the addition. Who knows, we might have, but all I know is that there are things in our house that can not be explained; but I guess it is just something we have to live with.

(Name Withheld)

Cumberland, RI

New England Homestead

This is for the benefit of non triprg members.  On June, 1989 and again in 1993, this group of investigative professionals became intimately involved with our family and this haunting.  We still owe this group of people a debt of gratitude and are delighted in observing their continuing success.
 
  
My wife, myself and three sons live on our family's ancestral home here in Southeastern Massachusetts.  Our family moved here from Rhode Island in the early 1600s and we can trace our ancestral line back to before the Mayflower landed.  The tradition of a physician or lawyer living in this house has been kept alive for generations and continues today with a second son starting medical school in September, 2006.
 
The house and stables that stands here now are the originals, both still standing on original foundations that were laid back then, so you can imagine the history the place has.  As children in school my three younger sisters and I were known as the kids who live in the haunted house or "that" house.  My sons tell me that hasn't changed, but they, at least, enjoy the fact.
 
The house has three floors with the bedrooms on the uppermost.   Even by today's standards the house is on the large size and with the exception of modern conveniences being added and some maintenance over the years it really hasn't changed much from when it was built.  We were raised not only as church going Christians, but to accept the fact that there are ghosts and the house and land on which we lived was haunted.  Otherwise there was no explanation for all the strange things that happen there, it was that simple.  When my parents had adult company or hosted a community event, especially around the holidays, my sisters and I would privately wager with our cousins on how long it would take before someone encountered one of the ghosts.  Unusually it was my Aunt Frieda, a deserving target for a haunting if I ever saw one.
 
There are seven major players here as far as ghosts.  A very stern looking man dressed in typical 1600s period dress haunts the entire house with a preference for the basement and library, a Native American woman who appears in the kitchen and birthing room, a young bearded man haunts the stables and tends to tidy up from time to time, an English Revolutionary War soldier, very young, appears in the living room and on the main staircase with a bloody bandage on his head and finally  children, three in particular, have been seen by everyone on many occasions in all areas of the house and land.  Again, research associated with the investigation of this property by triprg confirmed family anecdotal history saying that the house had been used as a quarantine facility during many fever and small pox epidemics and the greater majority of the victims of those terrible times were unfortunately children.  More than once I've been alone in the house, relaxing  with a novel in the library and I'll hear the laughter of children playing or suddenly smell the fumes of alcohol and herbal liniments.
 
My sisters have always insisted there are ghosts haunting the family crypt located in the family plot on property's back acre and I would tend to believe them.  The crypt was used during the Revolutionary War to secretly store arms, but mainly to hoard food.  Its on record that an English Captain who had commandeered the house and even lived there for a short time was told of the cache by an informant.  As a result, several people were hung in the cemetery and others eventually hung in the stables, eighteen in all.  The distinct creaking of weighted rope rubbing against wood often filled the barn and stables.  As it was one of my chores to help clean the stables and feed the horses, I've even heard women sobbing and then suddenly stop as the air would suddenly turn ice cold and you would hear this sound. You didn't dare go near the horses at this time because they were as spooked as I was.
 
My sisters now live abroad raising their own families, but we still get together here for our annual family reunion around the Christmas holidays.  First words out of their mouths besides hello is, "Has there been any ghostly happenings lately?" and I always have a story to tell.  As recently as last week we had an incident on the second floor with a painter seeing the old  gentleman "walking" from one room across the hallway and into the next.  It was only he, Dorothy ( my wife) and Jason, our 16 year old,  in the house at the time, and they were downstairs in the living room when the sighting occurred.  The young man was thoroughly delighted with his experience, although clearly shaken by it as well.  

(Name and Address Withheld by Request)

Jack Henry 

Back in the 70s I worked part-time nights as  a clerk for a mail-order business located in a three floor former textile mill in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Our offices occupied the second floor while the first was all law offices and the third was used for record storage exclusively. Nothing really remained of the old mill as such except the bellower and what was left of the original powerwheel works supposedly still located in the basement.  Since my first night I had heard the rumors concerning the third floor and the strange happenings that pretty much involved the entire building.  Whether you believe in ghosts or not, stories like that make you move a little quicker through the darkened areas of a place. 
 
On my third week there, we had been asked to work overtime to help process the mountain of Christmas catalog orders that had been arriving.  Normally our night ended at 10:00Pm, but myself and three other women decided to take the opportunity to make some extra cash. 
 
Maria, the oldest of us got up from her desk and then stood poised at the open door.  I could see her from my desk and asked if she was okay. She was normally the tough woman type and she was almost embarrassed to ask me to accompany her to the ladies room adjoining the break room located at the opposite end of the floor.  She was a devout Christian woman and although she openly believed in the supernatural, there was little that could rattle this woman except walking alone down the hallway that connected our well lit offices to the break room at the opposite end of the building.  I needed to stretch my legs so I agreed to join her.
 
We made it to the break room without incident and I waited with cigarette in hand for Maria at one of the tables nearest the door.  Next to the break room was the staircase that connected the second to the third floor.  I happened to glance at the clock on the wall and with a yawn I noted that it 11:50PM.  Just then and as expected the guard appeared at the far end of the corridor on his rounds. A nice man, I thought, as he graciously nodded to me before entering the stairwell. His footsteps faded as Maria finally came out of the ladies room. 
 
She smiled at me and then looked at the clock, visibly unnerved it seemed at seeing the time.  She apologized for taking so long, but I knew better and smiled as I could smell her sneaked cigarette coming off of her   After a deliberate glance down the hallway, she announced she needed to get back to work.
 
Once again we walked the length of the hallway without incident.  I paused at Katherine's desk, right next to our office door, and began to answer a question she had about an order.  It was then that I heard footsteps climbing the nearby stairs. I glanced to note the guard casually walking past the door and continuing down the hallway.  Katherine noticed my confused look and asked me what was the matter.  Knowing there was only the one guard on duty, I told her about the other guard and she gasped.  Within seconds, we were all gathered at Katherine's desk as I told everyone about the first security guard while waiting for Maria.
 
Finally, Katherine said, "That was Jason Henry you saw!"
 
I remember shrugging and replying, "Yeah...so?"
 
Katherine looked at the other girls and then me, saying, "Lori...this is going to sound crazy, but Jack Henry is dead.  He killed himself upstairs on the third floor about eight years ago!"
 
I laughed, having been the target of a practical joke just two days before, "C'mon will you?!"
 
Maria made the Sign of the Cross, adding, "This is true...its as we have been telling you!  He died on Christmas Eve eight years ago.  Kate and I were the last to see him..."
 
"He was pretty upset about something," said Katherine, "but he wished us all a Merry Christmas nonetheless.  That was Jacks way.  Then I hear about the suicide the following week..."
 
I worked at the office, both day and nights for another five years, and there would be plenty more people that would meet Jack Henry, some even quit afterwards.  As for my own encounters with Jack Henry, it never happened again as it did that night, but many times I and others would comment on how we felt him nearby.
 
Lori  (Mateo) Harris
Taunton, MA

HAPPY HALLOWEEN

I've visited almost all the haunted spots I can find in Rhode Island and can legally get into. I believe Nellie Vaughn's grave to be the weirdest. Every time I've gone there over the years something strange has happened the first time in 1998 and myself and three of my girlfriends all drove by and with no lights on in the car or from the street we saw two bright green glowing orbs looking like they were the eyes of one of the grave stones which you could see above the stone wall. we drove by three times and all saw the same thing over and over the green glow was bright as bright as the glow from the inside of your car stereo. The second time I went was in 2002 at about 3 in the morning myself and two other friends went b/c I wanted to show them the lights I saw. The lights were gone so we decided to walk inside b/c it looked like the stone figure was also gone so we walked in heard some rustling in leaves like an animal got scared and ran out we attempted to start to walk in again and both I an one of my other friends froze because we both with out saying anything got scared looks on our faces. We both heard at the same time children singing a song almost like "ring around the rosy" but different. we grabbed our third friend and jumped in the car going over and over "you heard that right, I'm not crazy". So we decided to leave at that point with some proof of paranormal activity b/c we're out in the middle of no where with no houses close and it was late at night where you should not logically be able to hear that. The third time I went in 2004 with two other friends again the one I originally heard singing with and one newbie. We were too weirded out to get out of the car so we opened the windows and the newbie and my friend saw a white dog/wolf and then it disappeared we bailed once a car was parked nearby and began to turn in not a cop car just a regular vehicle. we started to leave slowly and the car followed and then we pulled over on the side of the road just a bit away and the car just drove right on past without even bothering us. So I've been to other places in hopes of seeing something. I've had my fair share but Nelly Vaughn was the weirdest place I've visited.

I lived in a small house which use to be a shed in Middletown, Rhode Island. That was the most extreme experience I've ever had. I lived there for three months. The first month I started to hear a light scratching and called my landlord to tell him about a possible skunk under the place. Mind you there was no insulation in this house it was only a summer home with no heat either. Anyways he came and investigated and told me no sign so I went to look and there was much mud around so i looked for foot prints none anywhere well time went on and the sounds got louder. it was a small place and something was running around it on the roof, sides and bottom all within a matter or seconds and it was loud. It was impossible for anything to be on the roof then the floor then the side that fast, especially with no insulation walls to crawl around. Friends actually left my home when over b/c they were freaked out. It was strange, and it only happened at night and it became more and more frequent. Then one night I was woken by a loud bang only to see a man standing at the foot of my bed with a bandage around his head and a white shirt on with black small buttons. I was scared thinking I was about to be raped I backed up but couldn't scream and went for the light when I did he backed up and turned his head. Now I saw the blood spot the side of his head and could also see that his image stopped at his waist and I could see all my books behind him where his legs should of been I froze and then turned on the light. Sitting there contemplating if I was crazy or not for a couple hours finally fell asleep. After that night I stayed for month more but slept with the light on and burnt sage in the place. I heard no more noises and didn't see anything again. I looked up the history of the home with no luck. That was definitely the weirdest sighting I've ever seen and made me a true believer in ghosts.

 
Happy Halloween

NO REST FOR NINE TORTURED MEN

Last year I went to the Nine Men's Misery with some friends from my scout troop.  Members of our troop regularly hike the trails there picking up litter and generally just having fun.  As a Senior Leader of the troop, I have been to the monastery grounds many times, so often that I know it like the back of my hand.  In  all my trips there I have never seen anything spooky although I definitely do believe in ghosts.  Every time I go there I'm wishing to see of the ones people have said haunt the place since I was young haunt the woods and library there.  I was about to learn that we should be careful how we wish.
 
As I said, last year we were there again with mostly new scouts and another Senior Leader, Jason, besides myself.  We arrived at the Nine men's memorial and we all posed for a picture, courtesy of Jason.  He snapped several pictures and every time he seemed to get more frustrated with the new camera he was trying out. One of the younger new scouts said it was probably one of the ghosts of the nine men that died there playing tricks, which you might expect to bring some wise remark, but it didn't. He had only said out loud what we were all thinking and it gave me the creeps.  From the time we arrived there, there was an unsettling feeling about being there that I had never felt anywhere before.  It was as if there was a voice inside me saying to get away.  I saw Jason suddenly turn towards the woods and then shake his head.  It didn't take a whole lot of pushing to get the guys to move along after Jason was done..it was more like a race!
 
"Bob told me this place was haunted!"  I overheard Paul, one of the younger scouts, say to another.  His brother was once my Senior Leader a few years back.
 
On a rest break about a half hour later, Jason sat next to me and handed me to camera to showed me the pictures he had taken.  In every picture were areas of smoke-like fog behind us or in front of us in the picture.  In one picture, you could easily see in one of the mists the shape of a man's face..his mouth wide open as if screaming.  In the very next picture the mists were suddenly gone and the time on the picture said there had only been a matter of not even a second between the two pictures being taken.  I remember the feeling that suddenly came over me when it finally hit me what I had experienced, it wasn't all that great of a feeling. 
 
That night I went over Jason's for a while to hang out.  It didn't take long before we were looking at the pictures on his computer.  The whole thing was getting pretty scary now. I mentioned how unreal cold it suddenly got there and he said that he felt it too but thought it was just him.  He also said that he even thought he heard someone, a man, calling his name but he never said anything.  The rest of the night we spent playing pool and have never talked about it again, neither will Jason ever go back there!   At the meeting following that hike, I was taken aside by the Scoutmaster and asked why I and Jason, who didn't make the meeting, scared the younger scouts like we did.  He said he had gotten quite a few complaints from parents, but I told him we didn't do anything.  I made the mistake of telling him what had really happened and he got even more upset and sent me home.  Once both Jason and I showed him the pictures he dropped the subject, advising us that we did the same and we did.
 
I always expected an to have an encounter with a ghost someday and to have it be like in the movies, meaning you see it, get spooked and the you laugh because it was cool.  I never expected it to be something like this, something that was more real and more scary than I could ever realize or was prepared for (Yeah, I know...Be Prepared).   It was a healthy scare, though, and it opened my eyes to something that before was something I was just interested in for kicks. Now, it seems I can't get enough information about ghosts and ghost hunting.  I'm even thinking about starting my own group or joining one because my experience has opened new doors and a whole flood of questions that need to be answered.
 
Tom Aleverte.
Cumberland, RI
 

Like  a lot of people, it took a profound experience to open my eyes to the fact that ghosts not only exist, but can interact with the living.  To this day the experience and the events of that time leaves me shaken and its even caused me to question my sanity at times.
 
For the better part of a week I become a hermit in my apartment crunching my books  to study for  a major college exam coming up. Every night I had the feeling I was not alone, but brushed it off as my imagination and the stress the upcoming exam was bringing.  That is until early one morning  the sensation became so strong that I sat up in bed to see a figure standing at the foot of my bed. I wanted to scream or at the very least grab the baseball bat I kept on the side of my bed, but I was so scared that I couldn't move. As my eyes adjusted, the light from my goldfish bowl lit the room just enough to let me see that it was my deceased mother who had died four years earlier.  She looked very scared and was shaking her head as she mouthed the word, "No!" 
 
Every night following that night the same thing happened and it scared the sh*t out of me each time to the point I had become a total wreck by the time my two best friends came over that night.  They said I was studying way too hard and needed to unwind, suggesting we catch a favorite rock band of mine, Great White, who were performing locally that following night. Kelly and Jil never knew the meaning of accepting no for an answer so I finally gave in.
 
Again, I was awakened that night and saw my mother standing at the foot of my bed.  This time she seemed more frantic and there was a point where I could swear I had heard her voice saying, "No!"   Suddenly the room became filled with screams and moans of the likes I have never heard before or since.  Then, just as suddenly the vision ended and I was I awakened by the alarm clock on the nightstand.  I sat up, expecting to see my mother but I was alone.  I was so shaken by what I had experienced that I had become sick to my stomach by the end of the day when Jil and Kelly came by to pick me up. There was no way I was in any shape to go out drinking so I convinced them to go on without me.
 
By ten that night I was very sleepy and for some reason the feeling of being watched was gone. I plugged in a movie and wrapped myself in a blanket on the couch where I soon fell asleep.  It seemed like I had just closed my eyes when I was jolted from my sleep by a frantic banging on my apartment door.  I looked at the clock to see that it was 1:00 in the morning. I no sooner opened it and I found myself being smothered by my father and younger sister's hugs.  Debbie could only cry and all my Dad could do was tremble and say, "Thank god!"
 
It was February 20, 2003.  The Rhode Island club called The Station where Great White had appeared had caught fire killing nearly a hundred people, including Kelly and Jil.  Hundreds more had been hurt and horribly burned.   I can't help but wonder if my life saving experience was unique, but I know for sure now that there is an existence after this one. That knowledge seems to make life's problems so trivial! 
 

(Personal Information Withheld by Request)

Elliston

When I was about 20 years old I was currently attending a Liberal Arts college located on the bluffs of the Mississippi near Alton Illinois. Alton is reputed to be one of the most paranormally active locations in the U.S.
 
I would like to share with you an experience I had that occurred over several visits to a location called Elliston. This is a rather large manner house that has been renovated several times in the past and its owner ship has remained a part of the campus. It used to be a dorm room for artists. Currently it has been boarded up indefinitely. The why's have always been a hush-hush sort of story in itself.
 
Anyway, my first two experiences occurred one sunny afternoon in the fall, around three o'clock. I always enjoyed the view up on Elliston. It had a gorgeous view of the river valley. So I chose it to be one of the sites of one of my paintings. I carried my gear up there on foot and began my work. I had not stood observing my environment for more than 15 minutes before I started getting a weird feeling in my gut. Ya know when the hackles on the back of your neck raise, almost like someone is breathing on you from behind?
 
I turned around to see if someone was watching me but there was nothing there. Just the darkened windows of the building behind me. The building is poorly lit inside. I found it odd though, why the college had condemned the place. When peering into the building you could see old furniture, the occasional chair and stacked desks. An old stair case going upstairs. Strangely though, when ever I would try to look inside that building I would get a pinch in my chest. A tug almost. Well, by then I had already wasted several minutes of valuable class time looking into what seemed to be an empty building.
 
So I turned back around to try and get back to it. The feeling returned. Like someone was looking over my shoulder while I painted. It was a distinctly uncomfortable situation. When class time was almost up I decided I'd had enough. I packed up my gear and started back to the classroom.
 
Halfway down the hill it occurred to me that I hadn't made much progress on the painting and I would have to return. That nagged me all evening till I went to sleep. The next day the same thing occurred. The odd feeling of being watched. The strong sensation of having my shoulder looked over while I worked. I considered telling my professor about it and decided against it. He seemed like the type of person to have scoffed at the idea of Elliston being haunted. Besides it would have seemed like some dumb excuse to give him for how poor my painting had turned out.
 
Well that was the end of it for a while until I returned in spring.
 
That spring I started to run with a former roommate of mine and we'd run up to Elliston in the evenings. One such evening the sun had gotten really low as I had not gotten out of art class till late. I got that feeling again, though it was stronger in the dimming light. Like, somewhere in one of the windows I was being watched by something Malevolent. Something hungry or desperate, now that I think about it.
 
Well, the feeling seemed to stick with me as the two of us ran back down. I started talking to Jim about it and he told me about another evening. One in which I hadn't gone running with him. Apparently he had gone running up there in the dead of night with a buddy of ours. A really big guy who I know to be fearless. We're talking about a guy who likes to pick snakes up by their tails. Well, he and Jim had been running up there during a really dark night, no flashlights or anything and as they neared Elliston they noticed that the houses basement lights were on.
 
Did I mention it was condemned and boarded up?
 
This scared some sense into both of them and from what they told me, they broke their record time on the run back.
 
I suppose someone could have broken in and gone downstairs but why would they do that?
 
The third instance occurred during a rather eventful evening that same season. Later as the spring began to warm up and began to turn into summer. A mutual friend of my roommate Jamie and I, had apparently threatened her father with the prospect of suicide. After she hung the phone up on her dad she took off into the campus at night. When he burst into the room he seemed really freaked out. It was like he knew it had already happened. He cared about her a lot. So, I offered to help him look for her. We searched what seemed like a good mile of bluff trail before we decided to look up in Elliston. This of course made me stop and consider weather I really wanted to go up there in the dead of night.
 
Well we reinforced our two man team with a couple more people and decided to go up there in pairs searching the sides of the road for signs of the young woman. Well, Jamie and I managed to make our way up to the cross road that lead up into Elliston. The moon was maybe half full and it wasn't impossible to see, but the place was dead quiet. Which is odd. Normally you hear crickets, and frogs from the nearby sinkholes in the area that time of the year.
 
Well, he and I wandered our way over to the house and the feelings I got were very unwelcome ones. I looked over at him and he looked uneasy. I never saw Jamie scared too often, but the look I could see on his face through the blue gloom of the moonlight definitely didn't give me any confidence.
 
I suggested we sing Hymns. So, we harmonized our way through the dark to a small bench directly under the gaze of the house. We sat down and listened to the silence. Though it was odd, something seemed slightly calm about it all. Almost tranquil. No crickets, no wind, nothing. Not even the owls that nested in the islands in the middle of the river were not hooting. But the feelings of being watched were not entirely gone, but the malevolence seemed appeased.
 
When we left the bench we met up with the other two. Apparently they had been feeling strange vibes. The air would go from hot to cold at odd times. Like pockets of icy air were floating through the fields. We all felt it as we tried to pick our way back through the wet grass. Well, we decided that she was not up in Elliston. As we made our way back into the main part of the campus we all heard a weird sound. Either an animal, or a person moaning, or crying perhaps, through the woods. I would have assumed it to be a rabbit that an owl had snared, accept for all those weird occurrences.
 
Other people have shared experiences about Elliston. A student there at the college actually did a short documentary about Elliston's paranormal activity for a video project once. Within it was a story about a student who had apparently been asleep on their bed, when people were still living in it, when the bed had apparently been dragged across the room and lifted about a foot off the ground. Just her bed.
 
It remains a place of strange happenings to this day. People avoid it at night unless they are in large numbers. And they keep their distance during the day it seems.
 
Maybe next time I'll tell you about finals night in the art studio, the year after.
 
BTW, the young woman did not commit suicide. She is alive, well and writes rather sorrowful poetry. Several of them have been published.
 
-Mark


THE REAL "CROWHAVEN FARM"

When I was eight, my family moved onto an old farm in Ipswitch, MA. It was what we would call a fixerupper, but it was our first house and we were excited, since until then we had never lived anywhere but within the Boston East Side's city limits. We always lived in tenements before that and in low income areas, so when my father got a promotion and a chance at getting us out of there my parents took it. The idea of caring for chickens and selling apples but not having bars on our bedroom windows or baseball bats beside our beds was enough to make me and my three sisters pretty happy.

We had no sooner moved in when weird things began to happen like noises in the hallways like a broom sweeping and the smell of fresh lilac flowers or baking coming from the kitchen when no one had been in there yet that morning. My father and mother asked me one morning if I was outside the night before because they both had distinctly heard someone's singing. Its not like we were really all that shocked by this because the realtor was quite open about the 17th century farm having what she called an odd history. It even became the set of a made-for-television movie in the 1970s that was loosely based on the farm's strange history called Crowhaven Farm. The real local lore has the place as being haunted by a young servent woman named Mary Martin who had been condemned for the poisoning death of her employer and wife, but died from sickness in Salem Village's jail during in 1646 before she could be hanged. I did some research and the story checks out.

The house was redone pretty close to what it would have been like in the 1600s, except for the modern conveniences of course, and even by today's standards is a very handsome home. The problem is the same today that it was back then when I moved here with my parents. Men are Mary's more often than not target for Mary's more obvious reminders that she still resides here and still holds claim to a hot temper in the hereafter. Having the cold water being turned off, car keys suddenly disappearing but the reappearing on their own to the front porch and arms being nudged while shaving is not uncommon when Mary's anger is up. More ominous, however, was the evening when my now first (cheating) husband's dinner suddenly took on the aroma of almonds...the telltale scent of arsenic and it was Mary's poison of preference according to the official court records. I have always disliked almonds, so I would never cook or eat anything with them added to it! Paul was never welcomed here and became genuinely frightened by Mary's ghost. He left shortly after that meal, never to be heard from again, and I divorced him in absentia.

The farm is mine and my own family's now. My sisters never really cared for the farm although they still admit to missing our ghost who had become kind of adopted family to us. Thanksgiving gives us a chance to chat with Mary and set a place for her and our other passed on family out of respect. An investigation performed by two students from Yale University in 1989 and then again in 1991 provided us with some very amazing voices on tape and video evidence that Mary still resides here. Although Mary Martin has never been outright threatening to any of us or any of our guests, she can and does still cause a sleepless night now and then when she feels the need to do so.

I love this web-site, by the way!

(Contact Information Withheld by Request)

Pet Raven
by Ray M.

I am retired and live in Japan. Last year I fed many ravens all year, but it seemed strange that when I stepped out through the door no raven could be seen in the sky, on the telephone lines or other houses.

Last October, the vet at the animal clinic at the navy base called me by phone as I had left my number in case they had received a sick or injured bird. I went to the base and picked up the raven they said could not fly. I brought it home and put it in the large cage that I had built. This raven, which I named Kochan, would not eat meat from my hand; I had to put it on the floor of the cage. Every day I would sit inside the cage on a chair trying to be friends with him. I had his perch fixed so I could rest my bare arm there so he could sit on it as a perch and I would talk to him. Through November he would not sit on my arm, and this was the 31st. At the end of the month he was well. The next day, my wife Yukiko (Yuki)  and I were having our morning coffee and I told her that I was going to turn Kochan loose. We went outside and I said to Kochan, "It's time I turn you loose." He jumped on my arm and rubbed his head on my face and neck. I held the meat in my mouth and he gently took it out without biting or pecking me and then spread his wings only half way and trembled, as if he knew that we were going to release him. It seemed like he was saying, "Please don't turn me loose." Of course, I didn't.

Raymond

Guardian

The first week of January, my mother and I went to visit my elderly grandmother, who lives just outside of Memphis, Tennessee in a small town known for its lack of shops. She had just been released from the hospital. She was admitted for congestive heart failure. She has adult-onset diabetes and heart problems and doesn't take good care of herself, so much of our time was spent setting up a healthy and tasty diet and the rest was spent talking about "old-times" with my very large family.

One night, after the aunts, uncles, cousins, and other spare visitors left, we decided to have a quick nap. It was around midnight before we even got to bed, and I remember thinking how cold the house was even though the heat continued running full blast. I was unusually tired, perhaps because of the visiting family and dry heat of the house. Usually, I can stay up for hours on end without any ill effects, but this particular night I couldn't even raise my eye lids without the scratchy pain attributed to lack of sleep. I lay down in the large queen bed that had been in the house since it was built, in 1960. I couldn't sleep well at all and tossed and turned as I thought of the days events. I thought of my cousins, the sweet angels I wished to be my own children. I thought of my grandmother, her memory seems to be fading and yet she still tells defiantly about seeing grandfather in the hospital. I fell asleep finally next to my mother. No matter how old we get, our mothers are always there for comfort. I don't remember when I woke up or why, but I did awake rather abruptly. I remember this eerie feeling that I should look toward the closet door, which was on the opposite side of the bed where my mother slept. I sat up on my elbows and turned my face to the closet before opening my eyes. I wasn't afraid, but I was still reluctant. I opened my eyes and saw a shadow standing in front of the closet door, standing over my mother. At first I thought it was my mother getting up to go to the bathroom, but the figure didn't move. I looked at the bed and saw that my mother was lying there snoring. I then remembered my cousin was spending the night and that she may be checking on us. Somehow, this irrational answer seemed to fit and I laid back down to finish my nightly nap.

I do not know how much time passed, but I once again awoke. Again, I didn't know what had awaken me. There was no noise, no light, no disturbances to shake me from my REM. I again had the feeling that I should take notice to the closet door. I, at first, tried to lay back down for sleep, but soon my curiosity became a nervous fear. I raised up on my right elbow once again and turned my head to look over my shoulder. There she was. The shadow stood at the closet. A shadow that instead of being darker than the room, as most shadows are, was actually lighter. She had silver ribbons of moving light flowing through her small figure. I could tell the figure was female, even though a robe covered her featureless body. I tried to get a better look by turning my body to face her. As I squinted to get a better look, one feature - a nose, mouth, hair - would have been better than a lone figure, she disappeared. Her body faded into, for lack of a better phrase, thin air.

The next day I asked my cousin if she had gotten up in the middle of the night. I was still trying to find some sort of rational explanation. She said she didn't wake up until I did, and, in fact, a little later. I could find no evidence, no cause, no reasoning, but I know she was there. And until I find out otherwise, I believe she was my mother's and my guardian spirit.

(Name omitted by request)

“You assume much … !”

My husband, year and a half year old daughter Ginny (Virginia) and I moved into our dream house last year after shortcutting, coupon cutting and scraping for 8 years in a Providence (RI) apartment.  We just happened upon an estate sale on one of many escape drives into the rural areas of the state.  After talking to the sale’s host, estate executor and recent inheritor of the house, it wasn’t long before we learned the fixerupper house was for sale.  It wasn’t long before Ben and I had fallen in love with it.  The long retired schoolteacher was the last family member to live in the house, but health issues were forcing her into a healthier climate.

Of course, with every tour of any of the older houses in the area you get a history lesson, as if to prove its pedigree as a historical home, and our tour of this 18th Century farmhouse was no exception.  Of more interest was Mrs. W’s lack of any attempt to keep the fact from us that the house had a longstanding family reputation for being haunted, albeit benignly so.  Both my husband and I were budding ghost enthusiasts and this was more of a selling point than the huge operating walk-in fireplace in the living room.

Ben I and were hardly moved in when we were awoken almost nightly by sounds of doors opening and closing in the kitchen, what sounded like footsteps in the halls and on the stairs and the occasional squeaking of the well-pump outside.  Except for the basic utilities needed to make the house habitable by a modern family, the house was renovated to be circa 1797.  We learned that skepticism is healthy through our attending night courses and lectures offering lessons in paranormal investigating, many of them given by your own Andrew Leard. So right away, the noises were attributed to the wood floors and beams adjusting to the weather outside.  It had been a warm day and the night was typically cooler.  Asleep we went.

As months passed arrived, this reasoning was only going to go so far, as now the footsteps and noises were occurring not just at night, but at all times of the day and in different areas of the house.  I remembered one of our classes and placed several tape recorders around the house and asked, nicely, if anyone was there to talk with me.  That night Ben and I were sitting on the sofa listening to mostly static and background sounds of me doing my daily chores around the house and of course Ginny doing what Ginny does best, laughing and playing. 

Suddenly the recorder in Ben’s hand chimed out with a child’s laughter, playful laughter not mocking and it wasn’t Ginny. It explained a lot, the sound of running up and down the downstairs hall and a knocking sound, not unlike the sound of a solid ball bouncing. Ginny would often become transfixed on something neither Ben nor I could see.  She would follow it across the room.  Sometimes breaking out in laughter and amusement in her playpen

On the last tape, placed in the kitchen before I left for the store, you could clearly here (transcribed from actual tape):

ME: Okay…its four o’clock and I have to run to the store.  I you’re here, how about saying something to let me know…a name would be nice

--- sounds caused by my placing the recorder on the counter and leaving the house.---

VOICE: … Mary, of course…You assume much!

The phrase that ‘I assume much’ makes a lot of sense; because while cleaning the living room I happen to say out loud, quite jokingly, “Hope that’s clean enough for you folks.”  Ben was excited, I was freaking…its one thing to watch shows and attend lectures, it’s another thing altogether to step into the level and actually hear the dead.  Especially when they respond to something you do or say!

As time passed, Mary would let us know she was there through herbal scents, mostly cinnamon or lavender, as I had begged her not to appear to me until I said I was ready.  Ben says he has seen her fleetingly at one time or another in almost every part of the house. The eeriest visitor is a woman who’s name is confirmed as being Patience, a rarely evidenced ghost we’ve sensed in the living room that we think is the crier we’ve heard during the winter months only.

Our newest family member, a rescued beagle named Sam, is always strutting around and following “something” in the house with his eyes and even running after it at times…almost like someone’s playing ball with him.

As taught, research to back up what we are experiencing makes it easier to understand, accept and deal with calmly what is paranormally occurring.  It didn’t take long to find the established surname of the former landowners well documented in the town records.  A visit to a semi-maintained graveyard near our property line revealed where the mortals remains of our ghosts reside.  Now, the cemetery is regularly maintained and the land its on is now deeded to us.  The sadder note here was to see all the young children’s graves, victims of various epidemics that had swept through here.

We did have one more scare though.  In the barn just last week, where Ben’s woodworking shop was relocated to, Ben was sent running out of there just recently by a woman’s blood curdling scream…  Gotta love them barn owls! 

 (Name omitted by request)

(Please withhold information)

 

To whom this may concern,

As fantastic as the following story is going to sound, I assure you the events on that early September most assuredly did happen.  If there is a logical explanation for what we experienced I would be glad to her it, but to this day there has been none to ease the unsettled feeling I still get today even as I write this.  I am not now nor have I ever been psychic and if this is what that’s like I hope I am never given that ability.

My husband, Alistair, had just officially retired from the Reno (Nevada) police department and I from a casino manger’s position a year before.  As we had always planned, we had begun living the dream of selling our suburban house, moving into a 38-foot motor home and touring these United States.  Per our plan, we decided to officially begin in my husband’s hometown of Olympia, Washington.

Al is an experienced RV driver, so we had no reservations whatsoever taking Route 89 across the Sierra Mountains range.  The weather called for clear skies and cooler temperatures and some nighttime rain, but no snow.   By dusk, a day of hard driving had given us a bonus of watching the sunset that evening after hooking up at the State Park.  The threat of rain insured that in this huge park were us and one other RV couple from Maine who were due to leave that following morning.

As always, Al and I planned a night of fire watching that night.  Thankfully, the weathermen couldn’t have more wrong…stellar skies and a light wind made the night a fantastic start to our retirement.  Our neighbors, Bob and Debbie Briggs, stopped by for a chat and due to a common fascination with history, our conversation turned to the campground’s rather dark history.  Unlike the Mainers, who were purposely following the old wagon train trails to Sacramento, Al and I had by complete accident decided to stay in the very area where a wagon known as the Donner Party had met with tragedy.  I had heard of the wagon train way back in high school and vaguely remembered how the train had been caught in a blizzard and many died.  The details the Briggs had brought an eerie chill to our otherwise warm and friendly conversation.  Bob caught on though and emphasized that half the people survived that tragedy which made me feel a lot better…so I thought.

At about 11:00PM Al and I decided it was time to get some sleep.  We had no sooner settled under our covers than we both heard what could only be described as a person’s labored breathing filling our motor home.  I saw the look on Al’s face and knew it wasn’t my imagination.  He was a hardened policeman who had seen it all but this is the first time I saw his unnerved.  The RV was getting colder by the second and Al finally smirked, saying that the heater must have gone on the fritz.  He had no sooner stepped to the floor than the heat kicked on and the noise ceased.

“I never heard a heater sound like that,” I said, sitting on the bed staring out the window at the glowing coals from within our fire ring.

“Ooooo, look out its old man Donner coming for ya!” he replied.

Al caught a hard jab of my elbow for his comment, but we both knew Bob’s detailed tales of the Donner Party’s fate had rattled me and it wasn’t a stretch to consider the stories had gotten the best of both of us.

Get some sleep, Kate,” he said apologetically.  “We’ve got a busy day tomorrow!”

As much as I tried, I couldn’t sleep.  Our large window afforded a nice view of the campfire and I found the glow as comforting as Al’s arm holding me. The snoring was another story…

I felt as if I was finally falling asleep when I noticed a young woman, maybe a teenage girl, approaching the fire ring from our of the dark.  Except for wearing mid 19th century clothes and walking like ever footstep was agonizing, the stranger looked like ay other.

She pulled up her long heavy dress and stooped to her knees, placing her thin hands over the coals.  My heart felt like it was going to pound through my chest as the woman slowly turned her gaze directly at me.  Her face was like nothing I had ever seen before; it was empty, almost skeletal.  Her stare was nothing less than penetrating as one hand weakly stretched out to me and the other held a tattered scarf tight to her head and neck.

“Al…” I whispered.

“My God, Kate…I see her too,” he replied, his arm tightening on me.  “Is this some kind of joke?”

“I don’t think…”

I had no sooner started my reply and our campfire guest tilted her head and gave us the saddest stare. Her arm lowered and then she started away back to wherever she had come from.  I suddenly began to cry uncontrollably; my head and stomach ached severely.  Despite the heater being on and Al’s attempts to warm me up I was becoming increasingly cold and unimaginably hungry.  Without warning the episode ended as fast as it had come on.  I was warm, the pain and hunger were gone and the sadness lifted.

It wasn’t long before the sunrise and I begged Al for us to leave.  He didn’t need much pleading as he quickly told me to secure inside while he unhooked us.  We forfeited our days there, but there was nothing that could have kept me there for another night.

I have no doubt that the woman we saw by the fire was a member of the Donner Party.  The reasons for her haunting the area are manifold, I’m told, but she is only one of many, including children that have been seen lurking in the park when the sun goes down.

Katherine Desjardins

Al & Kate’s RV, USA

AMATEUR GHOST HUNTER

My wife and I decided to look for some local ghosts we found in a book. My wife had recently started seeing spirits again, she had not seen spirits since her childhood, and communicating with her spirit guide. We chose to go to two locations in Rehoboth Mass. one of which was an old schoolhouse/museum. When we arrived my wife got out of the car and walked toward the windows of the old schoolhouse. In the window looking out at us was the spirit of a woman, who looked a little put out. When the spirit moved toward the front of the building my wife freaked and jumped in the car. We left rather quickly. Not one to be intimidated, my wife decided to return to the schoolhouse a couple of days later. Virtually the same thing happened, we left quickly. This should have been the end of the story but for the fact that the next day there was a shadowy figure in our yard. We contacted her spirit guide who informed us that there was someone who wished to speak with us, after assurances that it was safe we agreed. Yes, the spirit from the schoolhouse had followed us home and was not so happy with our late night visits. She told me that we were disturbing her class. After trying to explain to this spirit that she was deceased, an idea she was not buying into, we promised not to disturb her again. A promise we have kept. This happened many years ago, but not forgotten by us.

 

thanks for reading
John and Nelia


Agness in the old Operating Room

y, January 27, 2009 12:03 AM

A few years back I worked the evening shift at a southern RI hospital most times by myself  .  For the most part it was great , I could list to my music  with no one there to complain it was to loud or they didn't like "that noise"  .  The department supplied medical things to the wards so , people would come to the half door we had and would yell my name and I'd go over to see what they wanted and go get it  .  Every once in a while I would hear my name being said by a female voice so , as usual I'd go see what the person wanted and as you may have guessed I'd get there and no one would be there  .  Other times I would lock the department up at night only to find out it would be open in the morning (and boy would I hear about it) .  After a while I started calling her Agnes (she didn't seem to mind) ,  I  got used to her company  .  As you see not all spirits are bad ......some just want to have some fun. The department that I worked in was part of the original operating room , hence the title, "Agness in the old Operating Room."

(Name Omitted by Request)

 

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