Speaker 1: My family on my mother's side have unique abilities. My grandfather,
as told to me by my grandmother, was for lack
of a better term, a witch doctor. People would come
to him because he could cure different types of illnesses.
He said my mother would be next in line, but
he died before he was able to teach her. She
was still able to predict births and feel the moods
of people around her. My abilities are the opposite. For me,
it's death and ghosts. I've had many strange things happened
to me, and there was one incident that bothers me
to this day. It changed my life. There's a church
near the Southern Park Mall in Boardman, Ohio, where my
brother's friend was a caretaker. It's a church and school combined,
so it's a large building with two large chapels, a classroom, offices,
and community rooms. A good sized group of us were
meeting there to play some game or another. One night.
We showed up early, so my brother's friend asked me
to walk around with him to shut off the lights
and lock the doors and generally just check the building.
It was I that he asked me to do this,
because I was always seen as George's little brother, not
their friend Christopher. These were all my brother's friends, and
I was happy to do it, though, because I saw
it as me being accepted into their group. All was
okay until we reached the room where the priest gets ready.
The worst feeling hit me. The pressure seemed to increase
and there was a disgusting feeling coming from the room.
I stopped and I said I can't go in there.
My brother's friends said, don't worry about it. You won't
be breaking any religious rules by going in. Well, that
wasn't quite what I meant, but I couldn't explain why
I felt that way, so I went in. It was
even worse inside. We walked through and went out the
other side. Instantly everything felt normal again. We locked some
doors and turned off a couple of lights before coming
back to the room. The second we approached it, I
got an awful feeling again and I begged not to
go in there. I even asked to go outside and
wait by another door, but he said no. It was
late February, with the temperatures and the teens and half
a foot of snow on the ground. At six feet
I only weighed one hundred and twenty five pounds, so
no thermal on me, and I was only wearing a
T shirt. But I didn't want to go in that
room so much that I would have willingly stood outside
to avoid it. I had no choice though. My brother's
friend was a former lineman for the football team. He
wasn't small, and we went in and the room felt
even worse this time, Just like the first time, As
soon as we left the room, the feeling went away.
Next we went to the basement, where there were some
more classrooms, the cafeteria and kitchen, and some storage areas.
Then we went back upstairs and entered the old chapel
from the rear side. We had to go across the
back to set a couple of doors just inside the chapel.
I stopped, I can't go in there. I told him
there's a ghost and it doesn't like me, and then
I pointed it out to him. He could see the
black shadow near the front by the organ. He uttered
an expletive and we headed for the doors across from us,
and it started following us. The faster we moved, the
faster it moved. There was just the one shadow, not
too so it wasn't our own shadows we were seeing.
We made it through the doors, moving at a pretty
fast pace. It was fifty feet to the corner where
the stairs to this third floor apartment were, and I
started feeling hot as we walked to it. It was
like something hit me, but it wasn't physical. For a
few seconds, I was completely disoriented and I lost all
thoughts where I was or even who I was. And
I was just coming back to myself when the second
one hit. This was worse than the first one. Now
I had to grab the wall to keep from collapsing. Well,
it passed, and my head was beginning to clear when
a third one hit, and this one put me on
the ground. My brother's friend pulled me to my feet
and away from that spot. Now I got my head
on straight, and I told him to go stand in
the spot where I was attacked. Well, he was a
big boy, like I said, alignment on the football team.
He bounced off the wall like he was nothing. That
stirred him into motion, and he grabbed me and we
ran up the stairs, and I don't remember touching a
single step in two flights. When we got to where
my brother was, he asked me how I knew of
the ghost, so I told him about my ability. About
a week ago. He said, I was getting in bed
with my wife. I just lifted my leg to climb
in when a face appeared in front of me. That
scared the crap out of me. He paused him minute,
and then he added it was just a face. There
was no head, no body, just a face. The next day,
he and his wife moved out of the church and
end with her parents. This happened back in nineteen ninety five,
A couple of years ago. I went back there to
talk to someone about it, and no one there was
able to tell me anything. I wrote down my name
and number, along with a note stating that I'd like
to talk to someone about what happened to me there,
but no one ever called me. It was still there.
I felt it that day that I went back. I
want to go there again. There are more details about
the church I'd like to clarify, but there are more
stories of things that had happened to people there. But
whatever is there, it's very strong. Okay, that's a ghost
living inside a church. I don't know something about. These
paranormal events are just captivating. They're very believable. Some of
these are very believable, and I really enjoyed reading this
person's account. Chris, thanks for the story. I really appreciate it.
I used to stay with my papa in the mountains
of Virginia every year when school let out for summer break.
We like to sit out on the porch at night
and enjoy the cool of the evening and talk. On
one of those nights, our conversation turned to hunting and trapping.
We'd been talking for a bit when Paupaul paused for
a few minutes, during which he must have been pondering
whether or not to tell me something that happened to
him when he was my age. I was sixteen at
the time. He said he wanted to go out on
his own and hunt and trap and sell pelts, and
times were different back then. It wasn't nothing for a
young guy that age to go off and do his
own thing. There was an old wooden room cabin way
up in the mountains, far away from anyone, that his
dad used as sort of a hunting lodge when he
was younger, and that's where Paupaul decided to go and
try his hand at being an independent man. He spent
several months in that cabin, collecting a variety of pelts.
But the winter was hard and living off the land
wasn't as easy as he hoped. He spent all of
one day hunting and got nothing, and that night, as
he slept, a storm blue in, dropping two feet of
snow on the mountain. That made things all the more difficult,
and Papaul still had to eat, so he set out
to hunt some game to sustain him until conditions were
right and he could make his way off the mountain.
He saw a deer and he took a shot. About
the same time he pulled the trigger, something spooked it
and it took off running. Popav said that he'd hit
the deer in its hind leg, and he set out
to track the blood trail through the snow, but it
was getting late in the day darkness covered the mountain
and he had to give up. He was disappointed, and
he made his way back to the cabin, and he
built the fire and made some coffee and tried to
stem the hunger with some hard tack next to the
warm fire. With the little food in his belly and exhausted,
he fell asleep sometime in the night. He awoke to
a strange, deep guttural sound, and he heard voices. Rocks
and sticks were being thrown at the cabin. He was
scared now, and he stoked the fire, and he lit
a lantern, and he hunkered down in the corner with
his gun, waiting for the worst. It didn't last long, though,
and once things had quieted down, he drifted off to
sleep again. A few hours later, he woke up with
a start. He was confused and angry with himself for
having fallen asleep in such a situation as this. His
cabin had no windows, but he could see sunlight coming
around the door. It was morning. Paupaul opened the door
slowly and peeked outside. He was still a little concerned,
and when he didn't see anything, he stepped outside to
find footprints in the snow all around the cabin. They
were giant human tracks, he called them. Judging by the
size and the number of tracks, he guessed there must
have been two or three individuals. He went around to
the side of the cabin to grab some firewood before
going back inside, and there laying on top of the
wood was a hind leg of a deer. It had
a single bullet hole right where Paupau had shot it.
Whatever those things were that scared him half to death
the night before had tracked the deer that he had
shot and took their share for tracking it, and then
they gifted Paupaul the hind leg. He was grateful for
the meat, but as soon as he was able, Paupaul
made his way down off the mountain, never having seen
what kind of buggers could make those tracks or rip
the hind leg of a deer off. I was born
the youngest of six children in a small Connecticut town.
We had a couple of dogs and a whole lot
of cats that my siblings that I looked after, since
they were all quite a bit older than me. It
wasn't long until they'd all gone off to college or
gotten married and moved out, and that left me to
care for the animals alone. By the time I was twelve,
we were down to just one dog. He was a
Norwegian elkhoun with a strong pull. Every day I walked him,
or maybe he walked me through the woods behind our
house to the tobacco fields far from the road, where
I could turn him loose and let him run. There
was a huge track of land owned in part by
members of my family and mostly surrounded by neighboring shrub
and tobacco farms. At twelve, I was finally allowed to
go alone on these daily walks. I wasn't afraid. We
had no black bears to speak of back then, and
the coyote seemed to stay away, and I'd never seen
a bobcat. A few years later, while I was in
high school, I encountered a mountain lion back there. They've
only recently acknowledged their presence in my state, but all
in all, I had no fear of anything, so I
would often take off on my own with the dog
Norwegian elkhouns, or a medium sized dog for sort of
compact version of a husky. They're known for hunting in
packs and bringing down moose and bear. My dog took
advantage of my female build and lack of strength to
pull extra hard and practically drag me through the woods. Nevertheless,
I started taking him to the fields every afternoon. We
walked up the wooded hill alongside my house and wound
our way on a well worn path and continue on
the thicket and more woods until we got to the fields.
Every day, when we got to the top of the hill,
which was about halfway on our journey to the fields,
I would hear a strange knocking sound and the quiet
of the woods. I would hear a long tree cracking,
and then it would be followed by three knocks. I
thought it must be a woodpecker, and so I shrugged
it off. After a while, I noticed that the tree
knocking only started when I stepped foot on a particular
part of the path. I never suspected that Bigfoot was
anything more than what I had read about in books
about the lock Ness Monster and other cryptids, and it
never occurred to me that that was what it could be.
But day after day, walk after walk, when we reached
that one specific spot on the trail, I would hear
exactly three knocks, and then I would go on my
way without incident. Pretty soon, though, my happy, go lucky,
hearty and hard pulling dogs stop trying to ease so
far ahead of me. He became clingy, hugging my side
until we got out of the area. Sometimes I could
hear something moving around in the woods, but I always
thought it was some deer watching me or some other critter.
And it was definitely watching me. I could feel it
the footsteps of whatever was making the noise were moving
toward me as well, not away from me. And once
I stopped, and the footsteps stopped, And when I moved,
it moved, and when I stopped again, so did it. Still.
I wasn't afraid. I was sure it was a deer.
I didn't realize back then that deer don't track people,
and my dog continued to look petrified. As I got
older and joined our high school's cross country track team,
I used that same route to get in some extra practice.
Sometimes I brought my flute with me, and when I
got to the top of the hill before the descent
into the field, I'd lean up against what we call
the big tree that grew there and play freestyle for
an hour. Each time I passed by that one spot,
I would hear three knocks. I didn't know to look
or listen for sosquatch, so it was quite a while
before I realized there were specifically three knocks. Eventually, the
pattern became hard not to notice. I started to believe
there were forest spirits, more along the lines of ghost
rather than bigfoot. I somehow knew intuitively that those three
knocks were not for me. They were about me. It
was as if they were telegraphing the arrival of the
human into the area. One winter day, I went up
the hill to take pictures of icicles on bushes for
my photography class. It was my dream back then to
become a national geographic photographer. I was enjoying pretending that
I already was one as I flopped down in two
feet of snow on my belly to get the right
angle from my shots. And as I did so, I
noticed an odd and increasingly familiar smell that reminded me
of really strong cat urine. Sometimes the smell was there
and sometimes it wasn't, but when it was, it was
always exactly where the tree knocks happened. I began to
look around for cougar tracks. At that point, I had
already seen the cougar that lived back there, and I
hadn't noticed that there were big, deep tracks all around me,
But now I was paying attention. I put each of
my feet inside a pawprint to see how big this
cougar was. The stride was my whole height of five feet.
There was also a long straight mark alongside the prints,
which I assume must have been its tail dragging I
was so excited because now I could show my mother
and preof to her that I really did see a
mountain lion up there. So I ran back to the
house and I got her, and she took one look
at the tracks, and with a funny expression on her face,
she said, I don't think those are cougar tracks. And
then that awful smell came back, and she remarked about it.
Her eyes got big, and she said, I don't think
we need to stay here. Looking back, I think she
knew something she didn't reveal. She tried to dissuade me
from following the tracks, but I was determined. She went
home and I went tracking, and I followed them, passed
a bunch of tobacco sheds to a swamp. They led
right up to the swamp, and then they ended. Things
felt odd. It was unnaturally quiet. A ghostly steam rose
off the frozen black water. The remains of a couple
of old cars from the nineteen fifties poked out here
and there, as if they were reaching out for salvation
against the encroaching decay of the hungry swamp. The woods
felt as if they were encircling me, closing in and
reaching out their naural limbs to wrap around me and
throw me in the cars. Call it intuition or maybe panic.
Whatever it was, I felt like the cougar must be
lingering near and watching me, So I turned around and
I ran home. There definitely was a cougar living in
that area. I'd seen it with my own eyes, but
it wasn't until years later that I realized what I
followed that day could not have been cougar tracks. I
hadn't paid attention to the fact that it was not
a set of four tracks, but it was two feet
The imprint I had taken to be the cougar's tail
was probably made by someone dragging a stick. My earliest
bigfoot encounters went on for six years, and I was
oblivious to them. Only after I saw a bigfoot did
I start to research them and finally interpret my childhood's
experiences correctly. I often think how lucky I was that
I wasn't attacked. Now I've since encountered those who were aggressive.
Also can't help but wonder what my silent, hidden audience
must have thought of my flute playing. When I was
a young girl, I lived in a familiar community in
a rural farming area in the Midwest. My grandfather had
one sister, Aunt Roseanne. She lived one mile south of
my grandfather's home, and our family's property went almost two
miles north to south and nearly one mile east to west.
Aunt Roseanne's husband farmed this land with my grandfather, and
we lived in another house on the same farm. So
I got to spend loads of time with all these
wonderful older folks who taught me more about life than
anyone else could imagine. They loved telling me old stories,
and I loved hearing them. I especially loved Aunt Roseanne's stories,
and I asked her to repeat them over and over.
I'd love to share my favorite story with you. I
wish I could tell stories like her, but I can't,
but I'll do my best to remember the words. When
I was a child and through my teenage years, there
was a scary old woman who lived down the road
from my aunt's house. She disliked my aunt very much
and dabbled in dark, scary stuff. At some point, Aunt
Mary was sure the old woman had put a curse
on her and her family to scare them or harass them.
Every morning, Mary and the girls would do the housework
before going upstairs for breakfast. While the men did the
barn chores. They would fix breakfasts and sit down together
before the day of real work started. Soon they began
to notice the beds were unmade, no matter how many
times they made them in the morning. Clothing was on
the floor no matter how many times they hung them up.
And then strange things began happening in the barn. The
animals became skittish, and it seemed impossible to keep up
no matter how much they worked. But worst of all,
charm marks began to appear on the doors of the outbuildings.
My uncle suspected someone was deliberately trying to frighten them away,
but Mary believed it was something supernatural and it had
something to do with the old woman down the road.
One evening in Midsummer, my cousins had a party on
Saturday night. Teenagers from all over the area came to
have fun and play games with us. My cousins began
to tell us about the strange happenings. They told the
story of the fiery man who had been seen around
the house, a man who was always on fire, but
he never died. The younger kids who were just hearing
about these events. They made great bored out of it
by laughing and making fun of the stories. One girl
who was wilder than most of us, she laughed a
great deal, and she even went to the back door
and opened it up, and she pretended as if she
was looking for the culprits. Before she closed the door,
she cried in her rather loud voice, fiery man, come
kiss me. She slammed the door and continued to make
fun of the situation until the evening ended. And as
the first kids opened the door to leave later that night,
they saw burned handprints on the outside of the back door.
We all saw them, and everyone left to go home
that minute. No one ever made fun of what was
happening in Aunt Mary's house ever again, and none of
us were allowed to visit Aunt Mary's house until that
dark old lady down the street finally passed away. It
was late that evening in August nineteen fifty three when
the phone rang. The caller was one of my mother's sisters,
calling to tell her that my maternal grandmother had died
unexpectedly while visiting friends in Detroit, Michigan. My father was
at work at the time, and I was sent to
bed while my mother and aunt talked. I remember hearing
my father come home from work and my parents quietly
discussing things. The next thing I knew, it was four AM,
and I was being awakened and told to get dressed
because we were leaving for my mother's ancestral home in
northeast Louisiana, near the little town of Oak Grove. I
was told that my grandmother's coffin was being shipped by
train to her home on their farm near the Beef River,
and the funeral would be in about five days. As
I sleepily walked outside to get in our nineteen fifty
one studabaker, all was packed and ready to go. We
were living in California's Central Valley at the time, as
my dad worked for an oil company there. All of
us being Southerners, we yearned to go back home, but
not under these circumstances. Blessed with good luck and no
car trouble, we made it to our destination after three
days and three nights of continuous driving, and as we
drove down the gravel road outside of Oak Grove, a
column of dust spread out behind us and we could
see my mother's childhood home up in the distance. It
was located well off the road, surrounded by their farm
land and further back by the dark woods. The house
was built long before the American Civil War and had
sheltered many generations, some of whom were still there even
though they had passed. I never felt comfortable in that
old house, especially when it was just me with no
other kids around, and at times I felt I was
being watched to make sure I was behaving myself. When
we pulled into the front drive, we were met and
welcomed and hugged by all the family and friends who
had been there off and on since the notice of
my grandmother's death. We were fed, and we got a
chance to clean up and rest after the marathon driving
trip we had just completed. We were told that my
grandmother's coffin had arrived and it would be going to
the local funeral home first before coming to the family home.
After a rest and a good meal, we were told
that Grandma was on her way. The hearse could be
seen coming down the dusty road a mile away. It
pulled into the yard, and the funeral director and my
grandmother's pastor accompanied the family men as they brought Grandma
inside and placed her on the byre and arranged the flowers.
The pastor blessed all those present the house, and he
blessed Grandma. The funeral director opened the upper section of
the coffin, over ground IMA's face and upper torso, and
placed a finely woven Gaulls type cloth over that part
of the coffin. Then he announced that those who wished
could come and see my grandmother, and most people did.
Then he took a couple of photos for the family
who were not able to come, and suggested to the
family that, due to the time elapsed during the train
trip from Michigan and the hot August heat, that the
coffin be sealed and not reopened. Everyone agreed. In the South,
there has long been the tradition of sitting up with
the dead. The deceased will be placed on a buyer
in the sitting room or living room, surrounded by wreaths
of flowers. Family and friends will take turns sitting with
the deceased continually from the time the person dies until
they are buried. Some of those present then took up
the vigil once the funeral director had left. The friends,
family and pastor and neighbors who had come to the
home to pay their respects and help with the vigil
got to visit and tell stories and eat the wonderful
foods they each had brought. We kids, mostly cousins I
haven't seen in months, got to go outside and play.
The mood lightened considerably, just like Grandma would have wanted.
After a couple of more days, the funeral director came
and took Grandma to bul a cemetery not far from
where she lived and where many of her relatives rested
in those days. It was already ancient and quite grown
up with vegetation, and had to be accessed by going
through two cattle pastures and two electric fences. It was
maintained by those who had family resting there, and I
remember many a day spent their cutting grass and wating.
After the funeral service, most returned to Grandma's home for
one last meal and more reminiscing. Goodbyes were set all around,
and some of those who had come from greater distances
lingered a few days longer. Well. This gave me a
chance to play with my cousins a bit more. Anytime
we kids would play outside, we would be told to
stay away from the woods far across the fields behind
the house. They told us the buggerman lives in those
woods and down on the river, and my mother remembers
being told stories of sightings of a strange man like
being often seen in the woods and around Oak Grove,
and in particular a long beef river. Large footprints were
sometimes seen in newly plowed fields and on the river banks,
and we kids loved to follow my grandfather's tractor when
he plowed, because he would frequently turn up arrowheads or
pottery shards and other neat things. Even then, we were
admonished to stay near the tractor and not go near
those woods. During the summer, when the corner would grow
tall and up near the house, we were told to
stay out of the cornfield. There had been folks who
said that the man would go into the corn fields
for the fresh sweet corn, and occasionally vegetable gardens would
be entered, and farm animals sometimes would come up missing.
One story I was told by my grandfather was when
he got home from World War One in about nineteen nineteen,
he and my grandmother were living in the house after
they got married. One night, my grandmother was sitting at
her dresser, combing her hair, with her back to the
bedroom window. People who lived well out in the country
at that time didn't usually put curtains on their windows
because their nearest neighbor might be a mile away or more.
As my grandmother looked in the mirror, she saw a
face in the window behind watching her. She said it
was large and dark, but since they were still using
kerosene lamps, it was not well lit. Grandpa had brought
home an old German pistol as a war trophy, which
Grandma kept in her dresser drawer. She is said to
have calmly pulled the pistol out of the drawer and
turned and fired several shots through the window. Grandpa came
running in and she told them what happened. He and
a couple of the family men grabbed their shotguns and
started looking around outside. There was no blood, but there
were large footprints in the soft damp dirt near the
water pump that they used for their water, and faintly
muddy handprints high on both sides of the window where
it had leaned against the house. Another time, there was
an incident during the night of something hitting the side
of the house hard enough to jar a hanging number
two washtub off a nail that held it. My father
was there that night and told me about it. Also,
several times they were awakened by the sound of someone
or something pumping the water pump handle up and down,
or a hand pump. To work, it has to be
primed by pouring water down the top of the pump
while you pump the handle, and the water being pumped
acts as a lubricant that somewhat quietens the noise of
the metal pump. Pumping a dry pump makes it quite
a racket and is only done by someone that doesn't
know how it works. My mother also told me some
more unusual things regarding that old house. She said, on
some days, when they would sit on the front porch
at noon or in the late afternoon, there would be
the sound of heavy footsteps that would come up the
steps and continue across the porch and end at the
bench that used to hold a water basin and soap
for men to wash up for meals after coming in
from the fields. These footsteps were always around noon or
dinner time. People made a habit of never sitting on
those steps during that time. Also, there were times when
they could sit on that porch in the late afternoon
and they would hear the sound of log wagons, wooden
wheels and planks creaking, and trace chains rattling as they
passed along the side of their house, the unseen loggers
driving down a logging road long since grown up and
nearly invisible for over fifty years. And then there was
the time my grandmother asked my mom to go into
the house and get some laundry soap, which she needed
as she boiled the clothes outside in a large iron pot.
When my mother opened the front door, there was her
Aunt May's rocking chair rocking back and forth. The house
was closed up and not a breeze was blowing. Aunt
May was an invalid. For the last few years of
her life, the family would place her rocking chair just
inside the front door so she could look outside and
watch the kids play, or just get a breath of
fresh air. She spent her time rocking and reading, and
she died in her chair a few years before this incident.
My mother did not go inside to get the soap,
but she ran to my grandmother and told her what
she saw. She and my grandmother went to look and
the chair was still rocking. My grandmother closed the door
and waited until my grandfather came out of the field.
She told him what happened, so he went and opened
the door, but the chair was still. He went inside
and brought the soap out to my grandmother, and she
asked him what had happened. He told her before going
into the house. He said, may, I don't mean to
bother you, nine, but many needs a soap to wash
the family's close, so if you don't mind, I'll just
take it now. So he got it and he left.
As far as I heard, there were no more chair
rocking incidents, at least any scene by the family. Now,
twice a year, I still make most of that same
trip we took in nineteen fifty three, but now it's
from my home in El Miraje, Arizona. I have a
brother who farms near Oak Grove, and I visit him,
and another brother in Monroe who gave up farming. I
am seventy five, and they're both older than me. US
eighties still exists in bits and pieces along its old route,
but now it's replaced by I ten and I twenty.
Today we can ride in comfort at eighty miles per
hour through parts of New Mexico and Texas, listening to
satellite radio. And we can stop in comfortable hotels and
motels and quench our thirst, or get snacks in any
of a thousand convenience stores or truck stops along the way.
The house and these people are all gone now. I'm
the last of my mother's side of the family from
that time. My mother was the matriarch, and she died
in two thousand and shortly after, so did her family reunions.
None of the young people know about these stories in
these people. The land is now commercially farmed. Much of
the dark woods are gone, cut and cleared for timber
and to make more farmland. Bill a cemetery is still
there now, it's an island between paved roads and nearby houses.
And Beef River is still there, as muddy and as
slow moving as ever. And I don't know about the
bugger man. I assume he moved on, trying to keep
ahead of the lumber companies and the farmers. Perhaps he
moved west to Falk, Arkansas. It's not that far away still.
I like to think that on quiet evenings, just at
sundown in the lonely fields west of Oak Grove. If
I were to listen closely, I might hear the sound
of lumber wagons long gone, still squeaking and rattling down
a ghostly road found now only in my memories.