True Life Ghost Stories: Part 5

This is from my friend Josceline. It gave me chills the first time I heard her tell it. It still gives me chills. It's pretty heavy and I appreciate her sharing, very much so.

*****

It was a warm spring evening, on the edge of the hot summer. I was sleeping poorly, having extremely fitful dreams; the kind where you wake up and for a fraction of a second you don’t know if the events actually happened or if you just dreamed them.

I awoke around 11 P.M. or so to a feeling of tension in the air. I felt slightly hysterical and extremely scared. I looked over at my window where I felt a presence and sure enough I saw a boy. He was not extremely defined, but I could make out that he was in his late teens, early twenties, of a medium height, and very much so standing by my door. For a moment I thought that this must just be a continuation of a dream I was having and attempted to wake up using my usual techniques. After a few seconds, I realized that was not the case and I was very much awake and aware. The fear took over at that point, though I had experienced interactions with “ghosts” before and been perfectly calm. I dove under my covers and begged the being to go away. I was confused about the amount of alarm I was feeling and absolutely terrified to look back at the spot I had seen the young man. I huddled under my blankets for an hour or so until I finally fell asleep.

The next morning I woke up feeling extremely sad and empty. I remembered my experience in the night and though I was slightly disturbed, I was alright with it. As I got out of bed and went up to my mother’s bedroom, I started to cry. I couldn’t stop the feeling like someone had died the night before and I was devastated, truly depressed as though it was me or someone close to me who had passed. My mom was worried and told me to stay home if I didn’t feel up to the day. I just kept saying that I felt like someone had died. About fifteen minutes or so after I had calmed down a little, my mother received a phone call from a close friend. She told us that an acquaintance of mine from high school had passed away around 11 P.M. in a car accident a short distance from our house.

I couldn’t help but think that there was no way it was a coincidence; I had seen his spirit, scared and confused. It took me a while to get over the fact that I let him down by asking him to leave instead of helping him, but I never saw him again.

True Life Ghost Stories: Part 4

This story is submitted by my Dad.

He said, "Not a ghost story, but scary stuff nonetheless..."

and I couldn't agree more.

*****

Halloween at Danvers State

Danvers State Hospital stood high atop Hathorne Hill in Danvers, Massachusetts. There were seventeen gothic buildings, on 600 acres of land, complete with towers and underground tunnels. From the towers you could see the Boston skyline, the Atlantic Ocean and on a clear day, the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

When it opened in 1878, it was an enlightened attempt to bring insane people out of their delusions in a peaceful setting. Instead it became the birthplace of the pre-frontal lobotomy and a testing ground for electroshock therapy and experimental drugs.

I had a neighbor who worked there and offered to get me a job in the kitchen. They paid a dollar an hour more than the $1.75 my friends were making washing dishes in restaurants and I could ride my bike to work. I sold my paper route to my brother and spent the next three years working in a place that most people were afraid to even drive by.

My job consisted of cleaning pots and pans bigger than I was, racking and unracking in the dish room, sweeping, mopping and trying to avoid the grouchy old cooks, mostly retired military guys with anchors and eagles tattooed on their biceps. We served thousands of meals a day. Several hundred patients were brought down to a huge cafeteria three times a day. Hundreds more were served meals on their wards.

To get the food to the wards required pushing carts loaded with food through a maze of underground tunnels connecting the buildings of the insane asylum. The tunnels were dark, dirty and frequented by mental patients with ground privileges. A fully loaded food truck weighed more than me and the lure of cheap labor was too much to resist. I paid the patients a nickel or a cigarette per truck to push the trucks for me, but still had to walk along side and bring the trucks up and down the elevators myself.

The tunnels were dimly lit and stunk of urine, feces and cigarette smoke. Every inch of the walls was covered with pornographic drawings and the twisted writings of schizoid poets. Creepy guys lurked behind corners and in the dark doorways of the tunnels. Like subterranean rats, they rarely saw the light of day. Fecal painters smeared the doors of the elevators while we were upstairs delivering the food. Cockroaches and rats looked at me like the trespasser I was. Every twist and turn of the tunnel brought me face to face with drugged out zombie freaks, brains fried with 700 volts of electricity. Everyday was Halloween at Danvers State.

True Life Ghost Stories: Part 3

The following story is offered from my good friend Larry.

*****

The year...1991. A close friend is preparing for a month-long African Safari. She asks me to house-sit for her while she is away. It's a nice place. A condo in what used to be the Children's Museum on Jamaica Pond. Not only that, it would cut my commute to work by 30 minutes so naturally I said yes.

I had visited the place several times in the past. And although it was freshly painted and clean as a whistle, something about it seemed strange. And I didn't know why. I was about to find out.

I spent my first night in my new digs just getting comfortable, Fire in the fireplace. Made some dinner. Watched some TV. Occasionally hearing a child laughing or talking. I thought nothing of it, assuming one of my new neighbors had kids who weren't quite ready for bed.

It was time to call it a night. Wash up, jammies, and then off to my new oh-so-comfortable bed. I set the alarm clock and shut out the light. Immediately I felt a presence in the room. I laid there with my eyes open, scanning the room, but saw nothing. I closed my eyes for a minute and the presence felt stronger. When I opened my eyes, there at the foot of the bed stood and image of a school girl complete with kerchief, skirt, and arms folded across her chest to hold her books. It was not a solid image, more of a hazy bluish-grey image, but very distinct. I knew exactly what it was. In a bit of a panic, I turned on the lights and she was gone. With my heart racing, I covered my head with blankets and eventually dozed off.

In the morning I called my friend. She had made a stop at her parents house in California before heading on Safari. There was no answer so I left a message, "Everything is OK here. The plants are watered. The mail is in. And, the ghost and I will be getting along just fine". Within an hour she called back and asked "what ghost?" I explained what I saw and she responded with "you're crazy" and "how much did you have to drink?" Nonetheless, I saw what I saw.

It was about a year later. I was back in my own house and my friend had long returned from Safari. I got a call from her late one evening. She was all excited about a conversation she just had with some guy at a Charity Function. "You won't believe this" she said.

Apparently the person she was talking to turned out to be one of the developers of the condo project where she lived. He actually lived in one of the units for a while. He asked my friend which unit was hers and when she told him he said "Oh, you must have seen the ghost." She was in shock. She explained that while she never had, a friend (me) said he had and she thought he was crazy. The developer went on to explain that the spirit that resides in the condo was that of a girl who had got separated from her class while on a field trip to the Children's Museum. She had wondered off and somehow ended up in Jamaica Pond. This apparently happened on a cold January day because the girls froze in the pond. The girl was not found until ice cutters came to make blocks of ice, which they used to do back then. My friend offered up an apology. But, suggested I may still be crazy.

True Life Ghost Stories: Part 2

This story is mine. This story is about the ghost lady that haunts the Windward Grille and Route 133 in Essex, MA.

Back in November of 2008 a ghost hunting show on the SyFy channel took to investigating The Windward Grill, a restaurant on Route 133 in Essex, MA.

They were looking to debunk reports of apparitions, an elderly couple...

We know nothing of the man. Just the woman.

Of course they found nothing but shaky heating vents in the ceiling, or something along those lines. Television is fake.

Somewhere along that same timeline Larry had a seemingly unrelated dream. There was a woman he knew to be a ghostly apparition. The ghostly woman told him that she would be waiting for my old lady at the hearth.

Well it just so happens that I had an upcoming gig at The Windward Grille, which used to be named The Hearth.

My old lady came to the gig and searched and drank wine and searched more, to no avail.

However, our commutes took us down route 133 daily, for years, and she claimed that one morning the volume in her radio flipped out and she thought "that was weird" and fixed it and realized she was right in front of The Windward.

I became Way skeptical when I heard the haunted radio story.

One beautiful evening we were driving and laughing on our way somewhere and streaming across the sky was the clearest, most beautiful, brightest shooting star, and we both said "ohhhh" from our agape and awestruck mouths...

and I looked back up at the road and said,

"Of course, we're right in front of the Windward..."

True Life Ghost Stories: Intro & Part 1

I am a skeptic. I don't believe in much of anything, except myself, which is one of the few things in this crazy world that I can prove exists. Sometimes.

However, these stories are unexplainable and made me think twice.

They're not "ghost stories" in the standard sense. But...they are Real.

*****

Part 1: Mom

Mom always told me about these two stories. The general idea is that when living people start conversing with dead people, it's a pretty sure sign that their time here is limited.

Mom ended her entry to me with this line, but I think it's worth opening with:

"That's it! Now please don't make people think I am crazy.....it is all true."

When my grandfather was in the hospital, Dad and I went to visit him. He and Dad immediately started to talk about fish, as he was an outdoorsman who loved fishing all of his life. As they enjoyed their conversation he stopped for a moment and asked that I go and get my Aunt some tea, referencing one of his sisters who had passed away years earlier.

"Girl, go and get Auntie Mary some tea, she has been waiting for you to come."

He died while we were on our way home from NH.

Several years later, I went to visit my Noni Gauthier in her nursing home. She mentioned that my mother had visited her that day and that she was so happy to see her. My mother had passed away when I was 9 months old. Noni died three days later.