Even MORE true paranormal stories! The first story you see here will always be the newest one. Enjoy!

Story 50

Aromatic Spirits

Jim and Sarah have lived in a gorgeous Victorian house situated on a lake for many years. Shortly after they moved in, they discovered they were not alone.

They would hear footsteps going up the main staircase when no one else was there.

Also, more than once, Jim was awakened about 2 am by the overpowering smell of bacon cooking. He initially feared that someone had broken into the house, so he got up and carefully made his way down to the kitchen.

There he found no bacon sizzling, and no (living) person.

Whenever the couple expected visitors, such as family members who planned to stay overnight, they would prepare the guest bedroom. As Sarah started to put sheets on the bed, the room would suddenly fill with the most horrible stench, like that of something dead.

The smell was so horrid that it would drive both Jim and Sarah from the room. Fortunately, it did not last long, and the aroma would be gone by the time their visitors arrived.

Sarah believes the nauseating stench was how the ghost signaled their disapproval of strangers coming into the home.

As the years passed, paranormal activity in the house eventually stopped and Jim and Sarah think that, thankfully, their ghost(s) moved on.

Story 49

The Curtis Ghost

Many years ago, Alan and his family used to go skiing in Southern Massachusetts. They would stay at the Red Saber Inn, which was right next to a graveyard.

Alan and his wife slept in a room on the second floor with their dogs, and their children slept in another room on the same floor. The third floor was an attic.

One night, Alan heard footsteps on the floor above. Then he heard them coming down the stairs.

The hair on his dogs’ backs stood straight up and they started growling.

The footsteps seemed to stop at the entrance to their room. Alan and his dogs jumped up and went to the door. Alan threw it open. There was no one there. The hall appeared empty.

The next morning, he said to the owner of the Inn, “We heard footsteps last night. What were you doing upstairs?”

“That wasn’t me. That was the Curtis Ghost.”

 “What’s the Curtis Ghost?” asked Alan.

“Curtis is buried in the cemetery and every once in a while, he comes over here.”

“You’re putting me on!”  

“No, I’m not.”

Alan later did some research and learned that even before the current owner took over the place, people had experienced the Curtis Ghost returning from the graveyard to visit.

The Inn was where he had killed himself.

Story 47

True Ghosts, Gruesome Crime

When Bruce’s cousin Randy was about 11 years old, his mother died. His father John did his best to raise his only child. He was a sweet and loving man, but he could not make up for the loss of Randy’s mom.

As he grew, Randy’s wild streak led him to do lots of risky things. But the worst was using and selling drugs. As a drug dealer, he started associating with dangerous criminals when he was just a teenager. He got in over his head but didn’t know it.

One day, his family home was burglarized, and they took some of Randy’s cash and drugs. Randy wasn’t going to let that go unpunished. He went to the house of the older men he believed had committed the crime, determined to retrieve what was his and also get revenge.

He pulled a gun on the men and demanded the return of his property.  

It was March 30th and Randy was 19 years old. He did not return home. Since he was often out and about all night and slept days, his father wasn’t immediately concerned by his absence.

But after several days, John grew alarmed. He called the police. They investigated but could find no sign of Randy. Days turned into months and John’s personality changed. Traumatized and heartbroken over the loss of his only child after losing his beloved wife years earlier, he became bitter and resentful. He stopped caring for himself.

Bruce entered the picture three years after his older cousin had disappeared. He had just graduated from trade school and got a job in the city near his uncle’s home. It made sense for him to move in with his favorite uncle.

The police had tracked down suspects in Randy’s disappearance, and the district attorney prepared a criminal case against the perpetrators. Since no body was ever recovered, the men couldn’t be charged with murder, but the DA had enough evidence to charge them with kidnapping.

The trial took place at the same time that Bruce moved in with his uncle. He saw how distraught John was, grieving his son’s loss and raging at those who had kidnapped Randy. It was clearly taking a huge toll on him.

One evening, John told Bruce, “Randy was here.” Bruce was startled by the revelation. “I could sense the smell of death in the house,” John said, and he pointed to a corner of the living room. “Randy appeared to me right there. He told me, don’t grieve for me anymore, Dad. I am dead and will not be coming back to you. Then he disappeared.”

Because Bruce knew John had been so distraught that he was taking medication to settle his nerves, he was skeptical. He thought the medication may have caused hallucinations or maybe John’s mind was playing tricks on him.

Bruce continued to live with his uncle for years after that, because he felt it was important to be there for him. Unfortunately, John continued to neglect his health and smoked heavily.

One morning at 4 am, Bruce got a call as he worked the nightshift. The police informed him that his uncle had been taken to the emergency room at a nearby hospital after suffering a brain hemorrhage. The tenants who lived upstairs in the duplex that John owned had called for help when they heard him screaming in pain below them.

Randy called his father, who quickly drove to the city to join him at the hospital.

John died on the exact same day in March that his son had gone missing 7 years earlier. An odd coincidence. Bruce said if a person is missing for 7 years, they’re presumed dead. So, in a way, it was the death date for both father and son. 

Bruce believed his uncle died of a broken heart. He was buried next to his wife, in the small town where he grew up. The family added an inscription to the tombstone memorializing their missing son. Bruce said his uncle would never do that when he was alive because he always held out hope that Randy might return to him some day.

Bruce bought his uncle’s house from the estate and continued to live there. But he could not bring himself to move into John’s old bedroom, the place that had witnessed so much of his pain. Instead, Bruce continued to sleep on the couch in the front room.

As time passed, Bruce began to notice strange things happening in the house.

The knob on the back door rattled as if someone was about to open it and walk in. Bruce went over to the door and looked outside but saw no one there. This happened repeatedly.

Bruce felt inexplicable cold drafts, which were especially surprising on hot summer days in the high 90s, in the old house with no air conditioning. This happened every couple of weeks or so.

Another repeat occurrence was a chair rattling in the kitchen when no one was there. Bruce would be in the front room watching TV and hear the sound of someone adjusting their seat. He walked into the kitchen to take a look. There he witnessed movement from his uncle’s favorite stool by the island; the very place John had liked to sit and enjoy his coffee.

Also, when Bruce was sitting on the floor in the front room watching TV, eating dinner on the coffee table, his can of pop slid six inches to the right across the table.

He had no explanation for these occurrences, but he wasn’t ready to attribute it to a ghost.

About a year after his uncle had passed, Bruce got tired of sleeping on the couch in his own house. He decided it was ridiculous, since he had a perfectly good bedroom to sleep in. Nothing had been touched in his uncle’s room since his death, but now Bruce cleaned everything out, including the old bed. He bought a new bed and moved his possessions into the bedroom, finally claiming it for himself.

Since he worked nights, Bruce would typically get home at 8:30 am. After a bite to eat, he would read in bed before going to sleep. But as he lay there, he felt the mattress of his bed moving. He wondered what the heck was going on.

He jumped out of bed, stripped off all the sheets and bedding, got down on his knees and looked under the bed. He could see the mattress moving in waves, almost like a waterbed. But this was a regular mattress! The exact same thing happened nearly every day for years.

When he told his dad about his experiences, his father dismissed them, saying Bruce’s mind was playing tricks on him and he should just ignore it.

As the years passed, the old neighborhood went downhill. Bruce dealt with vandalism and burglaries. He finally decided to sell the house to an investor, who intended to rent both floors of the duplex.

However, several months after the sale, Bruce got a call from the new owner. After a few pleasantries, the man cut to the chase. He said he was receiving complaints from the first-floor tenant, who was convinced there was a presence in the house. Bruce asked why. The owner said the tenant described doorknobs rattling, unusual cool drafts, and little things of that nature. The hair on the back of Bruce’s neck stood up.  

The new owner asked if he had any such experiences. Bruce related the story of his uncle and cousin, and his own experiences in the house. The new owner thought it was very strange.

One evening, when Bruce was at a party, he met a man who claimed he knew what had happened to his missing cousin. He said the word on the street was that his cousin had been beaten to death after the group of men he confronted wrested the gun away from him. They had then dismembered Randy’s body and fed it to hogs at a farm north of the city.

Bruce was shocked. But he said it was certainly plausible. During the trial, he had learned that one of the criminals’ cars had stalled on the freeway while it was northbound, and they had found incriminating evidence in the trunk of that car.

Hogs can devour bones. When a piglet dies, they’ll even eat their own young. So, they are the perfect animals to destroy evidence of a murder.

Whenever he heard of bones discovered north of the city, Bruce’s ears perked up and he wondered if they had finally found his cousin. But Randy’s body has never turned up.

We may never know the full truth about his death.

Story 48

Sailor Spirit

Cari’s father-in-law served in the navy during World War II, and still possessed his original uniform, a wool peacoat and iconic wool sailor pants with bellbottoms, precious mementos of his service.

One day, his son, Cari’s husband, brought the peacoat and pants to the dry cleaners, to preserve them intact for posterity.

But he forgot about the wool clothing at the dry cleaners until long after the date they were due to be picked up. Unfortunately, by the time Cari’s husband returned to retrieve his father’s sailor uniform, it was long gone.

It was a sad loss.

Years later, Cari’s father-in-law passed away.

Her husband needed nice clothing to wear to his father’s funeral. Because he was a rather casual person and rarely dressed up, Cari knew she would have to go to the basement to look through bags of clothing to find his seldom-worn suit jacket.

On the day of the funeral, she opened a bag she had looked through many times before. Sitting right on top of all the other clothing were her father-in-law’s wool sailor pants, which had been missing for years.

Cari burst into tears. She knew the inexplicable reappearance must be a sign from her dear father-in-law.

On the very day he left them, his sailor pants returned.

Story 46

The Silent, Staring Stranger

When Linda first moved into her neighborhood, it felt more like a small town. It was rather cut off from the large city in which it was situated, until a bridge was later constructed.         

Linda always felt very comfortable there. She loved to go cross-country skiing at night with her dog Lucy along the nearby creek. One night, she went out in the middle of a snowstorm, unworried that she would get lost in the blizzard since she was following the stream. No one was out that late but she and her dog Lucy. It was silent and magical.          

As she started climbing up the bank of the creek on her way home, she heard Lucy, who normally loved everyone, give a deep, low growl. The fox hound pressed her body against Linda.      

Then Linda saw what had alarmed her dog. A man stood about 30 feet in front of them, dressed in 1950s or 60’s style clothing, with a fedora, a raincoat fastened at the waist, slacks and loafers—all tan. It reminded her of something actor Fred McMurray might have worn in a 1960s cop show.

The stranger was definitely not dressed for the weather.    

He stood there silently, not saying a word. His arms hung straight down by his sides. He stared at Linda with an intensity that was unnerving. The look in his eyes was creepy.        

Linda’s dog growled deeply at the man and bared her teeth, every hair on her back raised up; Linda had never seen Lucy act that way before. When she tried to move forward, Lucy pressed her back.

She felt something was wrong with the man because of how her dog was reacting. Linda didn’t feel he was safe. She also wondered where he had come from. She didn’t see a car nearby. And he was wearing dress shoes, not boots. Why was he out in the storm?       

He had seemed to appear out of nowhere. 

He stared at her silently, his eyes never leaving her face. She felt threatened.       

“You need to leave,” she said. “If you don’t, I’m going to let my dog go. And what happens after that is out of my control.”

The man remained silent, staring at her with hair-raising intensity. It was not normal, the way he never took his eyes off her face.          

Linda was getting more and more weirded out.

She decided she’d better kick off her cross-country skis so she could defend herself if needed. She glanced down for no more than a few seconds to quickly release her boot from its ski.

When she looked up, the man was gone. She hurried up to the road and looked right and left, but he was nowhere to be seen. There was no way he could have gotten out of eyesight in that short a time, even if he had run.

And there were no footprints in the snow.

After he disappeared, Lucy acted totally normal. No more growling. She did not try to chase after the stranger when Linda released her. But then, who knew where he had gone?

Later, Linda described the incident to friends. She asked long-time neighbors if they recognized the man from her description. No one did.

“Are you sure he wasn’t a ghost?” they asked her

After that, Linda curtailed her skiing in the park at night. She did not want to run into that man again. Friends also gave her a hard time for going out by herself after 10 pm at night.

She never saw the silent, staring stranger again.

Story 45

The Visit Before Thanksgiving

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Lisa was sitting at her table with the sun shining in the window. Her house had already been cleaned, and she was writing out a list of what she needed to get for the celebration that she was hosting.

All of a sudden, she felt what she could only describe as “static” behind her back. It did not feel great. It felt like something was very wrong. She paused and a thought popped into her head, “My dad died. My dad died.”

Ever since her parents had divorced, Lisa had been estranged from her father. In fact, the only one of her siblings who remained in contact with him was her brother John.

At the family gathering on Thanksgiving, John came up to her. He said, “Lisa, dad died.”

Her father had passed away on the very day Lisa had felt the static and sensed his death.

When asked if she thought her dad had come to see her before moving on to the other side, she said yes. But Lisa said there were a lot of unresolved things between them, and the feeling she got from him was not comfort, but displeasure.

She has not felt him since.

Story 44

Haunted Depot

While I was at the historic Union Depot during a recent Book Festival, I asked one of the staff members if they had ever experienced anything paranormal on the job. Their response was a forceful “Yes!”  

They said one night at about 2:30 am when they stepped out of the elevator onto the second floor, they saw a light shining, even though none of the fixtures were supposed to be lit.

Suddenly they realized the light was surrounding a woman who wore a long, flowered dress with a very wide skirt that spread out in all directions. She also wore a bonnet.

When the glowing woman saw the staff member, she put a finger to her lips as if shushing someone. Then the employee heard the sound of little kids running away. The woman in 19th century garb disappeared.

The staff member went to security and asked if they had seen anyone on that floor and if any lights were on. Security had seen no one on the second floor and they said that level was dark.

*****    

The Union Depot employee also told me that during Covid lockdown, they saw a man wearing an old-fashioned hat and clothing, carrying a suitcase, striding to Gate B.

No one was supposed to be in the depot and there were no trains running at that time. The staff member alerted security to the intruder, and people arrived to search for the man.

But they couldn’t find him. No one was there.

Since there is no outside exit from Gate B, there was nowhere the man could have disappeared to.

Unless he just disappeared. 

Story 43

Spectral Sounds

Leisa brought her husband Ken to Savannah, Georgia because she thought the town was adorable. She had visited there previously with girlfriends, and they had stayed at The Marshall House.

That historic hotel had been a hospital during the Civil War. Many children had also died there when yellow fever hit the town in the nineteenth century. Leisa did not want to see ghosts, so she was glad that she and her friends had not experienced anything paranormal during their stay.

Leisa called The Marshall Hotel before she and her husband arrived to check which floor their room would be on. She wasn’t happy when she learned they were going to be on the fourth floor, reputed to be the most haunted level in the entire place.

The hotel staff agreed to move her to the second floor, where she had stayed before without incident. When the couple arrived, they learned their room was right next to the Mary Marshall room, which was rumored to be quite haunted. It made Leisa a little nervous to share a wall with that room, and she wondered if ghosts could enter their space through the fireplace.

One evening, the couple enjoyed a reception with alcohol and appetizers in the hotel, and Leisa was very impressed with the man providing music. He had a tip jar, and Leisa thought he was so good she wanted to give him something. She asked her husband if he had any money and he said “No, I left it in the room.” Leisa asked him to go get some cash so they could tip the musician. Ken obliged.

When he returned, Ken looked pale and had a funny look on his face. Leisa asked him if he was okay. He said, “Don’t send me to the room by myself again.” She asked him what happened.

He said that when he was about to exit the room and lock the door behind him, he heard little children laughing. They sounded like they were right there. He looked all around the floor, down the hall, checked the nearest stairwell, anywhere children could hide. “There was nothing.”

The hotel was notorious for having ghost children. Visitors often heard them running back and forth, laughing--usually on the fourth floor.

Leisa said, “They seem happy and nobody’s had a bad experience. They’re friendly ghosts.” Still, the encounter was unsettling.

The couple had specifically changed floors to avoid spirits.

But the little ghosts didn’t care.

Story 42

Invisible Visitors

Linda had more experiences with the paranormal when she moved into an old farmhouse in the country with her boyfriend. While she worked as a lab tech in a hospital, her boyfriend attended college. He had to get up very early one morning to head out but Linda did not, so she stayed in bed. 

Suddenly she heard a car pull into their gravel driveway. Then she heard the voices of people talking outside. She thought some of their college-age friends might have dropped by unannounced, as sometimes happened. She got up and looked out the second-floor bedroom window facing the front but did not see a car.  

Then she heard the screen door open and slam downstairs. She continued to hear voices as well as the sound of people opening and closing cupboard doors in the kitchen as if they were putting things away.

Since their friend group was close and casual, this would not be unusual. While listening to the conversation and commotion in the kitchen, Linda threw on some clothes and headed downstairs.

There was no one there. Not in the kitchen, not in any room. And Linda never heard a car leave even though she had heard one arrive.          

She never found out who the invisible visitors were.

Story 40

Both were Beckoned

A.

When Gene was a small child, he used to visit his great grandparents, who had raised his mother and her six siblings after their mother died and their father abandoned them. The elderly couple was like the maternal grandparents Gene never knew.        

One evening, Gene overheard his great-grandfather telling the gathered adults a story that scared him so much it stuck with him all his life.       

His great-grandfather described how every night, his deceased wife would come and stand at the foot of his bed. She would make a scooping gesture toward herself with her hands and say, “Come on, come on,” as if enticing him to go with her.   

Not long after this ghostly sighting Gene’s great grandfather passed away.

No doubt his waiting wife was pleased.       

B.

When Deb’s father Don was dying from a brain tumor, she, her sisters, and her husband Gene pushed him in a wheelchair around Como Lake, near where her parents lived.

Her Dad said that he had been dreaming about his father-in-law and brothers-in-law, who had passed away years earlier. He saw them sitting at a picnic table drinking beer as they often had. They gestured at him to join them.

Her Dad passed away shortly after.

Now he can raise a glass with them on the other side.

Story 41

Attic Nightmare

Many years ago, when Linda was going to school to be a lab tech, she sublet an attic apartment in a very old house. The place was cheap, but it probably wasn’t even legal, since it had no kitchen. Linda had to use a hot plate to cook and wash her dishes in the bathtub.

She never felt safe or comfortable in the apartment. Almost every single night, Linda dreamt that a dark, angry looking man stood at the foot of her bed, staring at her ominously. She would wake up terrified.   

One night, the dream was so terribly vivid and disturbing that Linda was tempted to go downstairs and knock on the door of the young men who rented the apartment beneath hers and beg to sleep on their couch.    

These same men had complained that they kept hearing loud stomping sounds coming from her apartment upstairs. Since she wasn’t home when they heard the noise, they blamed it on the young kittens which had recently been born to her cat.

Linda thought it unlikely that the tiny, lightweight kittens could make the stomping noises her neighbors described.    

Eventually Linda could take no more. She left the haunted attic.

But that didn’t mean she was done with ghosts.

Story 39

The Haunted Vaults

While we were in Edinburgh, we went down into their famous “vaults,” a series of chambers formed in the nineteen arches of the South Bridge, which was built in the late 1700s.

Fiona told us that when the city made homelessness illegal, people were punished just for being on the streets at night. This forced the poor and desperate to hide anywhere they could. Most ended up in the dank, dark vaults, Whole families were crammed into tiny, unsanitary spaces.

Criminals also hid out in those dark places, where murder and assaults went unpunished. Maybe that’s why the vaults are purported to be haunted

Fiona said that her husband is also a tour guide. One night, he came home looking white as a sheet. She asked what had happened.

He had sung a disturbing 19th century verse to the tune of “London Bridge is Falling Down” with lyrics about Burke and Hare, the grisly murderers who sold corpses to medical schools (particularly Dr. Knox) for a pretty penny. Supposedly the men preyed on the poor in the vaults.

“Up the close and doon the stair,
But and ben wi' Burke and Hare.
Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief,
Knox the boy that buys the beef.”

Right after he finished singing the verse, tinkly notes from an unseen music box played the same tune. He and all those with him heard the eerie melody. The hair rose on their arms.

No one could find a source for the inexplicable music, which seemed to mock them.

The lightless vaults suddenly seemed even darker than usual.

Story 37

Dream House Nightmare

Collette and her husband Tim were excited when they bought their first house, a charming 1½ story cottage built in 1939. On the day they were scheduled to move in, their family and the moving truck arrived to help them get settled.

But to their shock, the previous owner was sitting on the front steps and refused to vacate the house. He was extremely rude to everyone, just as he had been at the closing.

Even though the house was no longer theirs, the previous owners wouldn’t leave until after dark, completely disrupting what should have been a joyful move-in day for Collette and Tim. Instead, the encounter gave them bad vibes.

Worried about what the former owners might pull next, Collette and Tim changed the locks.

A few weeks later in the autumn, they had three unsettling experiences in the house.

One morning, when Collette went downstairs to the kitchen, she found a small puddle of water in the middle of the table. She looked all over and there was no sign of dripping or leaking from the ceiling. There was no glass, pitcher or vase on the table that could have fallen over.

The couple did not yet have children, so there was no one else in the house who could have spilled or poured the water. They couldn’t figure out where it had come from.

On another night, Collette heard what sounded like a repetitive mechanical squeak coming from downstairs. She had never heard anything like it before, and she couldn’t figure out what might be causing it. She woke Tim, but the noise stopped at that very moment, so he didn’t hear it.

At exactly 3:17 am on another evening, Collette heard footsteps coming up the stairs toward their bedroom. She woke Tim and this time he heard the noise. They were both frightened by the sound of a nighttime intruder. The footsteps stopped at the top of the staircase. They held their breath. The footsteps did not continue toward the bedroom or go back down the stairs. All was eerily silent.

Sometime later, when Collette was walking across the kitchen floor, she heard the exact same squeaking sound she had heard in the night and been unable to identify. Now she knew it had been the sound of someone walking across the kitchen floor, when she and Tim had both been upstairs in bed.

After this series of disturbing incidents, Collette and Tim stayed in the house for nine more years. Fortunately, there was no additional activity.

Story 38

Her Second Sign

I previously wrote about the sign I received from a dear friend on the very morning that she had passed (Story 8). I did not expect to hear from her again.

However, a little while after that incident, I walked into our family room/library to discover a pile of books strewn on the floor.

I looked up and saw that they had fallen from the top of a high shelf. The volumes had all been securely lodged on that bookshelf, not in a precarious position.

I couldn’t figure out how they had landed on the floor. No tomes had ever randomly fallen out of our bookshelves before.   

As I started to pick up the books, I realized that every single one of them had been shared with my friend over the months I had visited her before she died. None of the books on the floor were ones we hadn’t perused.

All were visual books focused on art or photography. My friend had been quite artistic before her stroke, so I had known they would appeal to her.

We had shared lots of smiles over those beautiful volumes.

I felt that she was smiling again when I recognized her second sign.  

Story 36

Haunted Hawthorne Hotel

Recently I traveled to Salem, Massachusetts, with a wonderful group of women, and we stayed at the Hawthorne Hotel. It was built 101 years ago and is reputed to be haunted, especially Room 325, Room 612, and the whole sixth floor. But of course, ghosts can go wherever they want.

I talked to a young man on the sixth floor when we stepped into the elevator to go down to the lobby, and he told me he was awakened by loud knocking on his door at 3:30 am, but no one was there.

One afternoon, I heard odd noises from the wall between my room and the next one. It wasn’t a knocking, more of a rumbling or scratching. (It did not sound like the mice I’ve heard in walls before.)

Sue found a bobby pin on the floor when she first entered her room on the sixth floor. She thought it was a little odd since the room should have been cleaned, but maybe they had missed the pin. The next day, she spotted another bobby pin on the carpet by her bed. On the third day, she saw a bobby pin right outside her door that looked like it had been deliberately placed there. It was perpendicular to the door as if pointing into the room.

Jeanne, who was on a different floor, heard knocking on her door one afternoon at 4 pm. When she opened the door, the corridor was empty.

Tina heard whistling that sounded like it was coming from inside her fifth-floor room on the very first night. It had a distinct melody, not the single note one might expect if the sound came from an air conditioner or vent. She ended up hearing the tune several times. Later, she learned one of our friends had experienced paranormal things in that same room on an earlier trip. 

When Lynn and Jodi were just hanging out in their room one night they heard a man cough or sneeze; it sounded like he was right next to them. Jodi asked Lynn if she heard that. "Yep, I sure did."  

The two were alone in the room and there wasn't anything on the other side of the wall. About an hour later, they again heard the sneeze or cough. They couldn’t figure it out.

Jodi, her daughter Bailey and friend Sue had an even more telling experience. The bathroom light in the fourth-floor suite they shared suddenly stopped working. The front desk sent someone up to replace the bulb.

Then the chandelier in the living room portion of the suite went dark. To make up for the lighting problems in their room, the hotel offered the women a voucher for a free breakfast the next morning.

When the three women were in their pajamas at 10:30 pm, the fire alarm went off. They weren’t excited about going out into the street dressed like that, but the hotel required everyone to immediately exit the building. There could be a real fire.

The fire department came with sirens blaring and checked out the hotel. They found no sign of a fire.

When the women returned to their room, surprisingly and inexplicably, ALL of the lights were now working perfectly.  

The next morning, while they were in the middle of breakfast, the fire alarm went off again. Once more, they had to go out into the street. The firemen showed up, but again there was no fire.

Later, when we were all together having dinner on the patio of a restaurant in town, the waitress heard us talking about the fire alarms at the Hawthorne.

She looked shocked. Then she told us that Judy, who had been a regular at her restaurant, had also been a longtime employee at the hotel. She loved the place and was known as “Judy of the Hawthorne”.

“She died yesterday” the waitress said.

The waitress thought turning on the fire alarms was just the kind of prank Judy would pull from the other side.

Maybe the hotel has a new ghost.