Even MORE true paranormal stories!

The first story you see here will always be the newest one. Enjoy!

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.