True Ghost Stories: Jim Harold's Campfire 2 Page 5

  Here’s a little bit of background: I was in a fraternity that had a house just a little bit off of campus, just right outside. It was an old orphanage, which probably seems ominous or something, but it really wasn’t. At the time, it just seemed natural to me. It was a great house with great guys. It was a very new fraternity, and they had just been in that house for a couple of years. There really wasn’t any history or anything. It was pretty much, “Well, a couple of years ago we moved into this house,” and that was about it.

  This is a pretty big two-story house. The main house was what I always thought was the administration building for the orphanage, that’s what I was always told. There were a bunch of other houses around that were obviously more modern, and those looked more like dorms. I was told, “Oh, nobody really lived in the main house.” It just kind of looked like a colonial house.

  A couple years after I’d been there, we had kind of gotten into telling the freshmen and the people who were rushing the fraternity, “Well, this was an old orphanage, and there were cages where they kept the bad kids.” We told these stories. I’d get into it, “Oh, this is terrible.” We’d bring these freshmen out, and we’d show them horror movies and that sort of thing. They’d have a hard time walking out to their cars to leave at night. I thought it was great.

  This strange event happened over the summer of my junior year. There were very few people living in the fraternity house, basically the guys who had stuck around for summer school. I wasn’t actually in the house that year, but a handful of my fraternity brothers were there. It was close to campus so one day I knocked off early from classes and went to see if anybody was up for lunch. Just kind of walked into the house to see if anybody was around.

  I walked in the front door and didn’t know if anyone was home. After I was inside, I started yelling, “Hey, anybody up for lunch?” I immediately heard kids laughing and running. I thought, “OK, somebody’s here.” I kind of ran around the first floor, saying, “Oh, who’s here? It’s Kurt, hey. Who’s here?” I kept hearing running from all over the house. It was just very distinct, boom boom boom boom boom. I yelled, “Who’s here?” Well, nobody was there! Then, I started to hear commotion from upstairs, too.

  As soon as I got upstairs, I heard more laughing and playing. I started to get a little frustrated, because I didn’t think anyone would have kids there. It was a new fraternity, and none of the brothers were married or had their own families yet. So, I was a little bit concerned. Did we have somebody sneaking around in the house, or what?

  I continued to walk through the house, and I heard them running and running. Finally, it stopped. This is a very isolated house; it’s kind of out on a hill, and there’s really nothing else out there. I looked around outside, and there were no cars and nobody there. For hundreds of yards, you could see the roads and everything. There was nobody there and for the longest time, I just thought, “That was odd.” I never got creeped out about the experience itself. At the time, the only emotion I was feeling was hunger. I wanted to go to lunch.

  It took me a long time to put two and two together. I was talking to my wife, after a Halloween party or something like that, and she was asking me whether I believed in ghosts? I said, “No, no, I absolutely don’t believe in ghosts.” I’ve had experiences where you have sleep paralysis, where you’re dreaming, and I’ve had those kind of experiences. Then, I started to think about this experience in the frat house.

  As a skeptic and as somebody who’s very scientific, the only rational explanation I have for it is there were ghost children running through the house! At one point, we went back to the frat house, and we were talking to active fraternity brothers who were living there at the time. I mentioned, “You know, I think at one point I heard children running through the house, and I have no explanation for that.” The fraternity brother we were talking to said, “Oh, yeah.”

  He said, “You know, yeah, there’s half a dozen people who have heard children running through the house.” I was stunned, “What? Really? People have heard this before? What’s going on?” He said, “Oh, yeah.” He said, “Well, have you heard splashing out in the parking lot? Because we have no idea why, but we hear splashing out in the parking lot.” I said, “What do you mean splashing in the parking lot?”

  While I was still a student, there was an old abandoned swimming pool that was right next to the house. There was algae and crud in it for the entire time I was there. A couple years after I graduated, they’d gotten smart and just filled in the thing with gravel and made it a parking lot. Obviously, he didn’t know about the pool being there at one time and he said, “The brothers don’t know why, but they hear splashing out here every once in a while.”

  It really started clicking into place then. After that, we talked more and it just got crazy. Like I was saying, we had told stories to freshmen about the kids and said, “This was an orphanage, and there were cages that they would put the “bad kids” in, and there’s a cemetery out in the woods.” As I heard these stories, I kind of passed them along to scare the kids and all that kind of stuff, but then I found out the joke was on me. It was all true.

  These guys said, “You never saw the cages?” I said, “No.” They’d say, “Well, here they are.” I thought it was something made up that we were just passing along. Since then, I’ve gone out and I’ve seen the cages, and I’ve seen the baby cemetery out in the woods. It was all real.

  Since then, we found out it was not a very happy place. A lot of bad things kind of went on there but sometimes former residents of the orphanage came back to visit and said, “Yeah, it was not a pleasant place to live, but the options were you were either in this orphanage or you ran out on the streets, and you were pretty much going to die.” It was bittersweet for them, because they at least had a place to live.

  As far as I know, I was the first one to have an experience, but boy, there’ve been lots there since then. One of the brothers said he came out of his room in the middle of the night and he was talking to a kid. Another brother came out and asked, “Who are you talking to?” and he said, “I’m talking to so-and-so here.” There was nobody there. Truth can be stranger than fiction!

  -Kurt, Cincinnati

  19. Grandpa’s Haunted House

  My grandfather lives about 30 miles from Nashville, out in the middle of the country. He has about five acres of land that’s completely surrounded by woods. He built his house in 1992. About five or ten years ago we started having interesting experiences in this house.

  One day, my father was working out in the garage, and my grandfather was walking back to the house, about a good 100-yard trek. My father saw somebody standing in the doorway of the house. My grandfather has a very, very large dog, and he is very protective. The dog was sitting still by the front door not moving, while my dad was staring at this man in the doorway who he thought was my grandfather. He wasn’t because my grandfather was still walking back to the house. My dad looked down, looked back up, the man was gone and this very protective dog still hadn’t moved.

  I guess about a day later, my grandfather was standing in his kitchen and saw what he thought was my grandmother standing behind him. She was wearing a very pretty, very old, red dress. My grandfather turned around, and she was gone. Absolutely gone. So he called for my grandmother, and she walked downstairs and asked him what he was yelling about. So, you’ve got full-body apparitions, and just all kinds of weird things.

  I spent the night, and the first time I stayed there, I was upstairs. They have a relatively older TV, one with the side knobs on it, the ones that make a lot of racket.

  So I was asleep, it was 2 or 3 am, and the TV turned on. I was 13 years old at the time; I didn’t think anything of it. I turned the TV off and went back to sleep. Ten minutes later, the TV turned back on and it had the knob you have to pull out to do it! I turned it off again. I was getting agitated at this point when it turned itself on again, so I unplugged it. About 20 minutes later, the TV turned on again while i
t was unplugged! I ran downstairs and spent the rest of the night in my grandfather’s room. I refused to stay in that room again.

  The next night, I was staying downstairs, and heard somebody walk up and down the stairs all night long. About halfway up the staircase, it changes from an actual railing to just a straight wall as it goes up the rest of the stairs. I could hear somebody walking down to the point where I could’ve seen them, and there was nothing there; then they would turn around and walk back up the stairs. This repeated all night long. Again, my grandfather built this house; nobody has died there, as far as we know, so we weren’t sure what was going on.

  I think the most interesting story out of everything was what happened to my grandmother. She was a tax attorney for a big company in Nashville. She was sitting on her couch, the same one I was sitting on when I was listening to whomever it was go up and down the stairs. It was about 10 pm, and she was doing paperwork. To her left, across their large living room, is a fireplace; to the right is the staircase. As she’s sitting there, she heard a little boy giggling. At the time, there were no little boys in our family. So, she was looking around and didn’t see anybody but she was still hearing giggling. Then, she looked over at the staircase to see a little boy sitting on the stairs, looking at her. He had his head poking through the railing, and his feet were hanging. He was just looking at her and laughing. He proceeded to pass through the railing, drop down to the floor, run, dive into the fireplace and disappear! She really had no explanation for what she saw. She still talks about it to this day, and this was 10 years ago.

  The only other thing that’s happened as far as my grandfather’s house goes was that they brought over some of their friends for a Sunday dinner, and their friends didn’t believe their house was haunted. They started mocking these ghosts, which I personally believe is a horrible idea.

  After dinner was over, they walked outside to their car and my grandparents followed them. They were continuing to mock the ghosts. They opened up their car door, and said, “Well, come on, if there’s anybody here, why don’t you just come with us, ha ha ha ha ha.” Needless to say, the ghosts did. When these people got home and walked in their door, they proceeded to see all of their books flying off the bookshelves, all of their paperwork flying into the air, books being hurled at them, and just all kinds of chaos going on in their house. They said to the ghosts, “Well, we’re sorry, and if you want to go back to the house, that’s perfectly fine by us.”

  My grandparents’ friends drove back to my grandfather’s house, and there hasn’t been a peep out of the ghosts since. Nobody’s heard anything. That was the last occurrence in that house. My grandfather’s house was there for at least five years before anything happened whatsoever. We’re really not sure what was going on.

  -Paul, Tennessee

  20. The Haunted Cottage No. 1

  My story is about a farm cottage. It was built in the 1500’s, and would’ve been used by the farm workers at the time. It was a really basic structure. In its original form, it had a basement, a living room, a bedroom, and an attic sort of all stacked up on top of each other. It was extended around the 1700’s. It had quite a large kitchen, a bathroom and a bedroom added onto it. It was in old ragstone, so it was very warm and very cozy, but very little.

  We rented this cottage, me, my husband and our little boy, who was about nine months old when we first moved into the place. We were there for nearly two years, and it was a lovely, lovely place to live in, but it was definitely not the quietest place.

  Lots of things happened when we were there, some quite dramatic really, looking back on it. Our little boy used to talk to somebody who wasn’t there. It was always in the same spot in the living room, and he’d be jabbering away in his baby language. Always in the same spot, very earnestly, he’d be having a conversation with somebody in a sort of a happy, little fashion, which was a bit strange. Not only would we have footsteps on the stairs all the time, but we’d also have footsteps on the staircases that were no longer in the cottage. We never really got to the bottom of it.

  We’d hear footsteps from the bedroom going up to the attic, but the staircase had been taken out! When my parents came to stay and my mum said, “Oh my goodness, the next door neighbors were running all night!” I told her, “No, that’s what happens in our house. We just have people, additional people, hanging out there.”

  It gets a bit weirder, really. The baby was in an old traditional cot and we had gates up, at the top and bottom of the stairs. We kept finding the stair gates and the cot sides down. My husband and I kept arguing with each other, “You must remember to put the cot sides up. If the baby rolls over, he could fall out. If he wandered out of bed when the stair gate was open, he could fall down the stairs.” Both of us were adamant that we weren’t leaving them open. Once, I saw the stair gate open by itself, which was very strange.

  We didn’t really quite know what to do with that, so my mum suggested that I talk to whoever was in the house, and just politely ask him not to do it again, which I did. It never did happen again after that and it had been quite frequent.

  Then, it finished off with me seeing somebody walk down the back. We had sort of like a covered stoop, like a covered porch on the back of the house, and I saw an old lady walk ‘round the back of the house. She didn’t come back ‘round. When I went out, nobody was there. So I didn’t think too much about it. I mentioned it a couple of weeks later to my husband, and he said, “No, I see her on the stairs all the time,” and he’d seen this old lady crossing the landing at the top of the stairs on about three or four occasions.

  We eventually bought a house, so we moved out. I was at a mother and toddler group about a year later, and somebody introduced me to the family that had moved in after us, who had two little boys. We were having a coffee and chatting, and the mother managed to get me on my own at one point, and she said, “Can I ask you a few questions?” I said, “Yeah.” She asked, “When you lived in the house that I live in now, did anything weird ever happen?” Come to find out, they were having exactly the same things happening.

  -Fiona, United Kingdom

  21. Geronimo's Revenge

  This happened back in 2004 when I was in the Army. I was still in boot camp at Fort Hill, Oklahoma. Training was separated into three phases. During the third phase, the culmination, we had a last field exercise where we went out for three days out into the wilderness. We were in the field to use everything we’d learned.

  It was the first night; we were in an area near the grave of Geronimo. He happens to be buried there, on base, actually. We were there, just bivouacking. We were set up and sharing tents. While lying there in the middle of the night, we just start to hear howling coming from outside the tent.

  Now, it was a flat area, it was dense brush, dense bush, and all around were trees. There was nothing around but just trees and bushes. We start hearing this howling, so I turn to my buddy that’s in my tent and I asked, “Do you hear that?” He said, “Yeah, I hear that.” Our drill sergeant at the time chimed in and said, “No one goes out. Don’t go out. No one goes out.” So, I guess it was unexpected. It’s a closed military installation, so there’s not really supposed to be any wild animals in there. It was just a really strange experience.

  The second night, there was just a strange feeling out in the woods, like you were being watched. I really don’t know how to explain it, but it’s not your typical, “Okay, I know there’s people out there,” because there wasn’t anyone.

  You couldn’t escape the feeling of being watched and on top of that, it sounded as though there were a whole lot of people out there stomping through the brush. We were in one general area bivouacking. Everyone including our drill sergeants and soldiers were in this one general area. So, there shouldn’t have been anyone else and if there were, it wouldn’t have sounded like three dozen people stomping through the brush.

  Even with the grave of Geronimo nearby, at the time, I really didn’t think much about it bei
ng the spirits of Native Americans. It wasn’t until years later, when I started looking back on it and I thought, “Well, you know what? It could be.” Back in, what was it, the 1800’s, that whole area was Native American territory. Obviously the military fought them there. It could be. Later, I thought about it and considered that maybe there’s still something, someone lingering there that doesn’t appreciate our presence. Maybe they saw us as the US Calvary of today.

  I wasn’t the only one to experience this. I talked to a couple of the guys after graduation about that night. They remembered it and they also mentioned that they felt like they were being watched that second night…that they didn’t feel comfortable at all.

  -Robert, California

  22. That Phone Can't Be Ringing

  My parents bought this house back in the mid 1960’s. It was a three family house in Jersey City, New Jersey. We were told that it went back to the days of the Civil War and that there were places in the house where people would be hidden as part of the Underground Railroad. In fact, during the time that we were undergoing some renovations, we found an area that could be used for such a purpose. But in any event, we had a number of things that went on in the house that defied logic.

  For instance, I took the cellar and made it into my room. I was 17 at that time and this was a place where we all used to hang out. I had a curtain up that sort of segregated it off from the rest of the house. The first thing happened to me when I was cleaning the room up. I heard someone whisper something on the other side of the curtain. At first, I thought it was someone who was in the house, maybe one of my friends stopping by, but it was too late at night. I stopped to listen further, and then right next to my ear I could hear someone laughing very quietly. Quietly, but the type of a laugh that sent chills up your spine. I just ran upstairs, and was so anxious that I pulled the banister off as I ran up the stairs.