Ghosts I've Met (Part 2 of 4)

Tales of True Haunts

I don’t entirely understand why I've experienced so many strange things. It’s not like I went out of my way to find them!

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I’m not a mystic, medium, psychic, parapsychologist, ghost hunter, ghost buster, or anything of the sort. I haven’t gone out of my way to pursue things that are “beyond nature.” These supernatural things just seem to find me. I’ve always wanted to see a UFO, for example… but never have. And I’ve never wanted to encounter the supernatural, but it’s crossed my path more than I think is usual. (I have some theories about why, and will share them in the fourth part of this series.)

When my family drove away from the house on Sharon Avenue (see Part 1), I thought my haunted days were behind me. I was wrong. Many more incidents have occurred over the decades since, which can be categorized (with lots of overlapping) as:

• Apparitions
• Poltergeists and other physical events
• Encounters with evil
• Psychic dreams

I’ll describe the first two here, and save the last two for Part 3.

Apparitions

Thankfully, I haven’t actually seen every apparition that people have reported around me. One of the oddest, in fact, was witnessed by my first wife (who I'll call "G"). As far as I remember, it happened twice, and (understandably) it freaked her out both times.

We were living in a relatively new townhouse apartment in northwest Columbus, OH. To set the scene, if you climbed to the top of our main stairs, you faced our guest bedroom. To your left, was the bathroom. And behind you (over your left shoulder), our bedroom. Since the stairs were somewhat treacherous, we kept a small nightlight on in the bathroom at night.

On two different occasions, G was startled by the sound of a door opening and closing in the bathroom (though there was no door in there). The light from the bathroom then dimmed, as if someone was walking out through the door into the hallway. A tall, thin shadow then floated into our bedroom, glided (not walked) along my side of the bed, and stopped beside me. It shortened slightly, as if looking down at me, and after a few seconds, straightened back up, floated back into the bathroom (blocking the light again), and then left through its same phantom door though which it came. Both times this happened, G didn’t wake me… she was afraid to. And though the apparition scared her, she felt that it was actually sad.

Strangely, she wasn’t the only person to experience similar events in the building. Her sightings almost exactly duplicated the experiences of the neighbor who lived on the opposite side of our bathroom wall!

Apparitions aren’t always of those who have died. Sometimes, one sees people who are very much alive… but who aren’t where you encounter them. This incident also involved my first wife… but at the time we were newly divorced and living in separate Boston apartments.

I frequented a funky local hang called “Frank-n-Steins,” where you could grab a hamburger or hot dog, sip a beer, and watch a classic movie. On one of my visits, I was parked on a stool just inside the entrance, when I noticed three strangely dressed young ladies at the end of the central bar. One was in camouflage fatigues, the other seemed to be wrapped in a parachute (and was carrying a big, wide-mesh, macramé bag), and the third was entirely in ninja black.

The movie was “Gone with the Wind”… which I’d never seen. Sometime near its end, the “camouflage” woman in the middle turned around and looked at me… it was my ex. She whispered something to each of her friends, who also turned to look at me. This happened twice, and the expressions on their faces were so chilling, that I left the place before the movie ended.

At the time, her mail was still coming to my apartment. So about a week later, she phoned to see if anything important had arrived. “How’d you like the movie last Friday,” I bravely asked.

“What movie?” she responded.

So I told her what had happened, and she replied that I was “really freaking her out.” You see, she was with those two friends that night. And they were dressed as I saw them. But while I was watching the movie, they were at a Halloween party across the Charles River in Cambridge. "And, in fact," she added forcefully, “I hate Gone with the Wind… You couldn’t pay me to sit through it!”

Naturally, the simplest explanation would be that they were indeed there... and were very upset at my presence. But the vehemence of her statement about the movie still makes me wonder.

Many years later, my second wife and I were staying at the Gateway Lodge, a favorite stopover on the long drive out to visit my family in Ohio. It is situated up a beautifully wooded hill off a minor trucking road in Cooksburg, PA.

We loved the place. This was during its intimate log-cabin B&B days… before it added a conference facility and spa. And the peaceful quietude, tiny little bar, log fire, and “Windam Hill” music piped throughout made it a special place to unwind.

But not this time! It was a miserably rainy fall night. After an overly sumptuous dinner, we rolled upstairs to one of the lodge’s “Historic Rooms” that we hadn’t used before. I had strong coffee after dinner, and couldn’t sleep. The mountain rains fell in torrents, and there were no lights on outdoors, in our room, or out in the hall. It was as close to absolute darkness as I’d seen in a long time.

And then my head snapped to the left when the bathroom door frame suddenly started fillng with light (just the door opening... the bathroom itself remained pitch black). A rectangular panel of misty light had simply filled the doorway.

Kate was fast asleep and I didn’t want to wake her. So I just watched the light grow brighter, linger awhile, and then fade away. Again, there were no cars or trucks passing on the road outside, and no light from any lamps in or out of the lodge. But the bathroom doorway still got pretty darned bright.

The next day, we asked the staff about it, and learned that other guests had reported strange events in the same room. Some reported lights… others, moving shadows… and less frequently, sounds. One person even terminated their stay after waking up to find a transparent person standing at the foot of their bed. So I think I was lucky.

Poltergeists and other Physical Events

Poltergeists are usually thought of as “noisy spirits.” But many are more guilty of physical mischief than noise. One odd little instance occurred in my present house more than 20 years ago. Kate and I bought this little cape-style abode from the people who built it in 1952. He died here of natural causes very shortly before his wife put the place on the market.

We lived with the house for a few years before we knew what we wanted to do with it. Renovating the kitchen was our first priority. We punched out two interior walls, and turned a tiny square kitchen, half-bath, and a small paneled office into a large, open-air kitchen with sliders out to the deck.

I’ve read that renovations sometimes stir things up, and that’s precisely what seems to have happened. Because one evening, while Kate worked on some dinner preparations near the sink, I chopped salad fixings on the peninsula we had added nearby. Her back was to me, when a tall glass of lemonade in front of me rose into the air about a foot, tilted slightly, floated back down (still tilted), tapped the edge of its base to the counter, rose again slightly, leveled off, and finally settled back gently. I asked Kate if she'd seen that. She hadn’t… but she had heard the tap and the settling back. Nothing like this has happened since… so I think that (perhaps) the former owner of the house just wanted to give us a quick toast for a renovation well done!

Even with that, I wouldn’t say that our house is really haunted. Only occasionally have odd things happened. For instance, after we installed our alarm system, it went off every Friday afternoon at exactly 3 p.m. Both of us were at work, and this was not only an inconvenience, but the fire department and police were ready to start levying fines. So I called the alarm company to find out what they thought the problem could be. Their first question was “Do you have pets?” We didn’t. And amazingly, their second question was “Do you have ghosts?”

Seriously!

I said that I didn’t think we did. But apparently, since ghosts are frequently associated with drops in temperature, they can trigger alarm systems’ infrared sensors. Fortunately, after a couple months, the 3 p.m. Friday alarms simply stopped.

And both of us have also heard our spouse come home, open the storm door, then the inner door, and close them again. And both times, when we hollered “Hi” we received no answer… because nobody was there.

That kind of experience isn’t rare. The owner of the now-defunct Sheaf Street Inn (in Portsmouth, NH) experienced the same thing when he was alone there. Only his ghost was Rev. John Bellamy, who had roomed in the top floor of the place during the roudy days of tall sailing ships.

Kate and I didn’t know about John when we came to Portsmouth to celebrate our 5^th wedding anniversary. After a marvelous dinner at the Blue Strawberry, we returned to our room (which was on the ground floor between the inn’s front door and its stairs). Unfortunately, I had strong coffee after dinner (will I ever learn?), and couldn’t sleep. And around 1:30 in the morning, a group of drunken revelers walked by outside. Immediately, I heard footsteps run down wooden stairs, out the inn's front door, and onto the sidewalk… where they stopped

Waiiiiit just a cotton-pickin’ minute!, I said to myself. The feet I heard were running down bare wood stars… and the inn had plush carpeting everywhere. And the front door was perpetually locked! You had to use a key to open it from either inside or out. But the footsteps had run straight through it without pausing. So I got up and checked. Yep… the stairs were plushly carpeted and tightly spiraled. And the door was still closed and locked.

Next morning, we asked the innkeep about what I'd heard, and (smiling) he told us about Rev. Bellamy. While alive, he used to run out to the street to harrangue inebriated sailors about the evils of drink. And after he died in his room on the top floor, sailors reported that his ghost continued doing so. They quickly learned to walk along the other side of Sheaf Street!

Apparently, I'm not the only person who's noticed John’s antics. People staying in his former room on the top floor had even seen him. And maybe that’s why the inn is now a bakery… and our former room, the breakfast area.

Another poltergeistic experience found me at the beautiful (and famously haunted) old Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego, California. I was attending a trade show, and though I had a reservation, by the time I finally arrived from Boston, they were full up.

But they had a stunning solution. The six bedrooms in one of their luxury suites were all occupied by unrelated guests. So the central common area adjoining those rooms was locked off and going to waste. They offered me a huge discount on that space, and I grabbed it! Walking in, I entered a vast terraced realm of potted palms, statuary, fountains, columns, mirrors, sofa beds, many chairs, a large kitchenette, and a huge TV with luxury seating. There were also sliders out to the deck, for easy access to the convention parties. In a word, it was heaven for a tired traveler.

That is, until late that night (and every night while I was there). Between midnight and 3 a.m. the lights all started turning on... along with the TV. I’d run around turning everything off again, but they just wouldn’t cooperate. So during my visit, I became quite familiar with the ghosts’ favorite late-night B-movies!

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They were alone in the basement… fighting… when he tried to hit her. His hand didn’t even get close to her face before he was picked up and bodily thrown across the room into the far wall. He never came back… and the impish ghost proved herself to be an able protector.

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Another poltergeistic incident occurred in one of the cottages in the retirement community where my mom lived late in her life. The place was way out in the farmlands of northern Ohio, and people visiting its residents could rent newly empty cottages for as long as they needed. So when I flew out to visit mom, I snagged a unit in her cul-de-sac for a week. I think you can guess why the unit had recently emptied. But that didn’t bother me.

Strangely, though, the entire cottage was a cellular dead zone… everywhere, that is, except the tiny tiled area by the front door and the coat closet. I couldn’t make calls anywhere but there… even going outside didn’t help. So I had to sit there to call home. And the first time I did, I was sitting on a chair facing the closet door when its lever handle turned downward and the door slowly opened toward me. I stopped talking for a while. No-one was behind the door... which then closed and latched shut. (It was the only time this happened while I was there.)

But after I hung up, I decided to grab some digital photos of the place to show Kate how nice it was. And when I returned home and put them on the computer, I found that the very first photo (which I shot from the chair where I made the call) was strangely “fractured.” It looked like something had briefly stopped the camera from saving the image and then after a pause, let it continue. So the image was missing part of its middle, and the two halves were shifted out of alignment. Another shot that I took in the bedroom showed a curved streak of light back in the blackness of the bathroom. And several of the photos taken throughout were full of what ghost hunters like to call “orbs.”

Frankly, I’ve always believed that these "orbs" are nothing more than the camera’s flash reflecting off of dust, rain, mist, or snowflakes in the air. I still do. But I remain puzzled by the fact that I did not use flash for any of the photos… and have actually seen nothing like these effects anywhere in the thousands of other real-estate interiors I've shot over the years with the same camera (even when I did use flash). So I remain mystified... especially by that fact that I still slept unusually well in the place!

Not all ghosts (or poltergeists) are scary or hostile. Some can be good. When I was the Senior Editor of Networking Management Magazine, my copy editor (who I’ll call “J”) experienced stunning proof of this!

We heard her story at dinner in the century-old New England farmhouse where she lived. Shortly after we sat down around her large coffee table, a loud tapping commenced near our feet. It came from an electric outlet set into the floor. it wasn’t the first time people had heard it, and J's cat didn't like it either. J once asked the town electrician about it, and he told her he had installed the outlet there in place of a servant’s call button in the former owner’s dining room. And J believed that the tapping was the ghost of that earlier occupant... still trying to bring servants to her table!

But this wasn’t the only ghost in the place. No sir! Both J and her roommate often heard a woman whisper their names. And their hand towels, face cloths, and jewelry would sometimes disappear… only to pop up later in odd places (like on the hoods of their cars). They also used to keep a large jar of Twizzlers on the counter for snacking, and on some mornings, they'd wake to find that all of the sweet chewy sticks had been neatly cut in half during the night.

After the incidents accelerated, J decided to research the place. Nearly a century before, it had burned to the ground, and a young woman had died. Strangely, at her death, the victim was the exact same age as J … and shared the same first name!

So J and her roommate came to think of their ghost as a tragic, friendly guest with a playful sense of humor. But they soon discovered that she was much more than that. For J’s boyfriend at the time was a local cop with a rough edge. And one day, they were alone in the basement… fighting… when he tried to hit her. His hand didn’t even get close to her face before he was picked up and bodily thrown across the room into the far wall. He never came back… and J’s impish ghost proved herself to be an able protector as well.

Still another sweet little incident occurred just after I moved into an apartment beside the John F. Kennedy birthplace on Beals Street in Brookline, MA. Late one night, while I was repainting my living room, I looked out the window and into a second-floor window in the JFK house. Suddenly, a light came on in that room. It was on a table beside a bed. But I saw no sign of who turned it on. It just came on and then after a few seconds, turned off... with no one there.

That struck me as odd. So when I spotted a U.S. Park Service employee opening the house the next morning, I went down. I asked whether the light in that room was on a timer, or whether they had a custodian. The ranger stared at me before answering: "No, there are no timers in there and nobody is in the house after we close." But looking a bit shaky, he added that the room where the light turned on and off was the very one where JFK was born... in that very bed, beside that same light... and that the prior day also just happened to be his birthday. Hmmmm.....

Well, to keep this hub from getting too long, I’ll break here. And in Part 3, I’ll describe some:

• Encounters with what might be called "evil"
• Psychic dreams

So sleep well my friends… And see you next time!