More American Hauntings

This story was told to me by my mother and grandmother when I was younger. This incident took place when my mother was between eight and nine years old, back in the 40's sometime. My mother was in bed with her two other sisters late at night sleeping, when she awoke to see a black figure standing next to her by the bed. She was so frightened, she screamed for her mother to come to her room, and that someone was near her bed. Her mother ran to her room with a broom, and told the "figure" to leave her daughter's room because it was scaring her. Her mother chased it down the stairs through the house and "through" the back door of the kitchen. I say through because my grandmother said that it did not open the door to run out, but it went through the door and disappeared. Within that week, my mother fell ill. She was diagnosed with rheumatic fever, and was laid up in bed for a year. I also would like to say that a similar experience happened to my grandmother's brother. He fell ill and was diagnosed with polio shortly after his experience.

I must admit, I had never been much of one to believe in ghosts or supernatural phenomena until I had a rather chilling conversation with a friend of mine's mother back in 1989. She was a Cherokee lady, and one day at my friends house she began to tell me that weird experiences had followed her from place to place since childhood. As we talked, she told me the story of her daughter. Her daughter had been murdered in a park in Durham, North Carolina in 1985. It seems that the next night after the funeral, she had a very strange dream, or so she thought. At about 3:00 a.m. , she heard a knock on the door. She went to answer the door, and when she opened it , her daughter was standing in the doorway wearing the dress she was buried in. Her daughter said "mamma, I've come home, I'm home mamma". She told me that she woke up immediately after this, but attributed it to the trauma of having just lost a child. The next morning, she was preparing breakfast for her two sons, who were only around 10 and 12 at the time. They were playing in the sisters room, and one of them opened the closet. They came out terrified yelling "Mama, the dress is in the closet, the dress is in the closet." Not knowing what they were talking about, she went with them into her sisters room. There hanging in the closet was the dress that her daughter had been buried in the day before! I thought this was all crazy, saying "yeah, right." Then she proceeded to show me a couple of pictures. She had taken a picture of her daughter in the casket right before they had closed it. Anyway, she showed me where there was a little blood on the collar where the mortician had done a sloppy job (she had been badly beaten). She
then showed me the dress that had been hanging in the closet, and it had the exact same blood marks on it as did the picture! I had unbelievable chills run down my spine. Even weirder when I went to pull out of their driveway that night, I looked in my rearview mirror, and he daughter was sitting in my back seat smiling at me. I turned around quickly, and she was gone. Nothing in my mirror either. I almost did not believe this, but it's funny how it takes something like this to get someone to believe sometimes. This was my first, but not my last ghostly experience. It seems like this opened a door for weird stuff, but I will never forget that night.

When my three daughters were aged two, three, and six, my wife, children and myself were living in an apartment in a seedy area of Dallas, Texas. Shortly after we had moved into the apartment, the air-condition was working at 50 percent, so I installed ceiling fans in all the rooms.

Three months after the fans were put up, the one in our bedroom went out, the motor fried to a crisp. As I lay awake reading one night, the fan started to move, almost as if it were on its lowest circulation setting. I turned to my wife and shook her awake and whispered to her to look. She glanced up, disinterested and stated that it was the air conditioning causing it to turn, yet the moment she said that, the air conditioning kicked on. So if the air conditioning was not on, and no windows were open, what was causing the movement? We didn't know, but were certainly wide awake!

After this event transpired, there were several more occasions when we would awaken to see the fan turning, and we could stop it physically, yet an hour or two later, again, it would turn as if of it's own volition, but it never turned during the day. Always after 10:00 P.M. and before 4:00 A.M. We questioned the apartment manager if any one had died in this apartment and were told no.

After a few weeks, my wife and I were up late on night when my six year old came toddling out of the bedroom and said, "Daddy, the man keeps waking us up." I immediately checked the room, but no one was there, and even though I assured my daughter it was a dream, My wife and I were convinced we were not alone in that apartment.

Two weeks after the "waking us up" incident, I crept into the room to check on the girls and found my three year old having a conversation. I told her that she and her sister needed to go to sleep immediately, but she told me she was the only one awake. I asked her who she was talking to, and she told me, "The man who keeps waking us." My wife and I started looking for another apartment, and during this two week process, we were told by the children that the man would not let them sleep, unless they talked to him for a while, and if they did not, he would shake them or their bed.

Upon moving out of the apartment, we told the manager that we found it hard to believe no one had died in that apartment because of the activity. She simply stated that the previous tenant had not died IN the apartment, but a BLOCK AWAY from the apartment. He was robbed and killed walking home.

When I was 17 and still lived with my father, I had borrowed his car to go out with my girlfriend that lived in Florence, SC. Normally, I never had a curfew, but since I had my dad's car, he asked that I be home by midnight. Things ran a little long, as they can when there is a 17 year old boy involved, and I wound up heading home a little later than I had hoped to. So, I was driving a little fast, which I was and still am very used to doing. There is this intersection in the back roads of Florence county that we considered a short-cut from Florence to my house in Olanta and I am used to not really slowing down to make the turn (ever seen Bullitt with Steve McQueen?). Something told me, that night, to slow down and take the turn carefully. Not being one to ignore my conscience, I did so. On the left hand side of the "T" intersection, there is a bit of farm land, two HUGE oak trees, and an ancient looking house between those trees. The house had been torn down earlier that month and only rubble was there at the time (nothing remains now). As I slowed to make the turn, I noticed an old man in his coveralls walking towards the car. He had what looked like oil stains on the front of his clothes and was pretty dirty in appearance and looked as if he were trying to flag me down, so I stopped. I had my window rolled down (dad smelling smoke in his car would have been bad), so I asked if he needed some help. He smiled and walked towards the car. Then, as his foot would have touched the road, he vanished. Needless to say, so did I (have I mentioned yet that a Pontiac Grand Am will go from 0 to 60 mph VERY quickly?). When I got home, I rushed in the house and woke my dad up telling him the story. He looked down at his watch and said, "Damn, son... It's only 12:01... you don't need and excuse!" So, I proceeded to tell him how the guy was dressed and what he looked like (good memory from being a Cop's son)and he wrote it all down. The next day, he asked me to go with him to the drug store owned by the Sistrunk family (who also owned the land that the occurrence happened on). He had called earlier and described the man. When I got there, Frank showed me a picture of his grandfather that had died in a farming accident some 40 years prior... It was the same man I had seen the night before.

A laundress, newly moved to Charleston following the Civil War, found herself awakened at the stroke of twelve each night by the rumble of heavy wheels passing in the street. But she lived on a dead end street, and had no explanation for the noise. Her husband would not allow her to look out the window when she heard the sounds, telling her to leave well enough alone. Finally, she asked the woman who washed at the tub next to hers. The woman said: "What you are hearing is the Army of the Dead. They are Confederate soldiers who died in hospital without knowing that the war was over. Each night, they rise from their graves and go to reinforce Lee in Virginia to strengthen the weakened Southern forces." The next night, the laundress slipped out of bed to watch the Army of the Dead pass. She stood spell-bound by the window as a gray fog rolled passed. Within the fog, she could see the shapes of horses, and could hear gruff human voices and the rumble of canons being dragged through the street, followed by the sound of marching feet. Foot soldiers, horsemen, ambulances, wagons and canons passed before her eyes, all shrouded in gray. After what seemed like hours, she heard a far off bugle blast, and then silence. When the laundress came out of her daze, she found one of her arms was paralyzed. She has never done a full days washing since

Hello, my name is Jodi and I would like to report some things that I have seen in West Virginia: A place called Lucas Dairy I lived in a house there for two yrs. and every night we went to sleep we would hear noises like a lady crying and something walking down our stairs. So one night I went to sleep and my mother woke up screaming for my father. He kept saying what's wrong she said there was something in the house he got up and checked... nothing! The next night he stayed up and fell asleep and my mother awoke again and was going downstairs for a drink of water and she saw a blurry vision walking downstairs and she heard something crying my mother was pretty freaked out! So she ran back up the steps crying and holding me and my sister and my father. The next morning we went to our landlord and asked him about if anyone else has seen visions. He said yes, but he didn't think anyone was serious so he went and looked back in his family history book and it said that it is believed that three witches sacrificed a woman and her baby and that the woman still roams the house looking for her lost infant because supposedly the baby was sacrificed after the mother and buried in the wall! We were the last people ever to live in that house after it had been discovered. Nobody has lived there since and nobody will again!

My Aunt and Uncle lived in a very old house far out in the country of Charlottesville, A. They lived there with my three cousins.

The house was actually an old schoolhouse in the early 1800s. Afterward, in the mid 1800s, the schoolhouse was made into a regular house. During this period a family lived there with their four year old daughter. That winter, the young girl came down with pneumonia. They lived so far from town, and there was such a horrible blizzard taking place, that it was impossible to take her to a doctor or have a doctor come to her. The girl eventually died and was buried right under a tree in the front yard of the house.

The house was very big and very interesting. In the basement you could see the drawings that the children made of the teacher on the walls back when it was a school. A lot of unexplained sounds like walking up the stairs and sounds of doors mysteriously closing by themselves happened a lot, but it wasn't anything anyone paid too much mind to - until one day when my aunt came home from work to find my little four year old cousin sitting on the steps.

My aunt asked her how her day was and what she had done. My cousin replied that she played with her new friend that she had met. My aunt asked her where she met this new friend of hers and my cousin replied in her room. Then my cousin pointed her finger to the top of the steps and said, "look mama, there she is!"

My aunt looked up but there wasn't anything there. She asked her where? My cousin replied, "she's standing right there mama!"

My aunt looked up again and still she saw nothing. Very freaked out she asked my cousin what she looked like and my cousin described her as a girl wearing a white nightgown. Then my cousin turned to my aunt and said, "she had to go away again".

Needless to say, my aunt does not live there anymore. They left not too long afterwards.

When I was 18, my friend Gary moved into his own apartment in Lake City, SC. So, like any 18 year old, I was always over there hanging out. We had been in the den area playing video games and waiting on friends to get there one night, when the door opened by itself. Both of us dismissed it as a combination of the wind and a poorly shut door. So, we shut it. Ten minutes later, we heard the door open while we were upstairs getting ready to go out. I went downstairs to tell our friends that we were getting ready only to find nobody there. So, I shut the door, locked it with the deadbolt and headed back up. Five minutes later there was loud knocking on the door. We opened it to find Gary's dad standing there with money for us (we had done some work for him earlier that day). We told him about the door, and he said that the place was supposedly built on top of an Indian burial ground, which we all laughed about. Such a cliché in ghost stories and horror movies. We returned home after hanging out with our friends only to find the door wide open. We entered the apartment and looked around. Nothing missing and no forced entry, so we locked up and settled down for some movies. About five minutes after sitting down, the deadbolt turned and the door opened again with nobody being there. So, Gary yells: "Damn it Pocahontas close the damned door, I'm not trying to cool all of Lake City off!" The door then slammed shut, and locked, then all the doors in the apartment slammed shut as well and we heard loud angry sounding breathing. Both Gary and I got up and left via the back door without a thought. When we got around to his car, in the front, we could see a figure inside the den pacing back and forth. We left and went to his parents house. Gary moved out the next day!