Creepy crawling experiences from multiple people highlight this super spooky edition of Campfire. Enjoy!

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to our gathering tonight. Here we share stories of ordinary people who have experienced extraordinary things. Sit back, relax, and warm yourself by Jim Harold’s Campfire.

JIM HAROLD: Welcome to the Campfire. I am Jim Harold and so glad to be with you once again. We’ve got a great show for you today. If you’re new around these parts, what we do is we share real stories from real people. They’re true accounts of strange things that have happened to them. Could be ghosts, could be creepy cryptid creatures, could be UFOs, but regardless, the stories are amazing, as are our storytellers. (Try to say that three times fast!) We welcome you to the show.

And I appreciate you listening so much, I want to give you something. Go to jimharold.com. Click on the orange button at the top of the page to get your free eBook of 10 favorite Campfire stories compiled from our various Campfire series of books from the podcasts. It’s absolutely free. Just go to that orange button and click there, and you’ll find out how you can get your free copy. So far we’ve gotten great reviews. People have said they’ve really enjoyed it and thanked us. So please, enjoy my free gift to you – and enjoy this gift from our storytellers: some great Campfire stories.

Adam is a new listener, and he said he was in the process of a move, he started listening, and he’s listened every day since. We appreciate it. He’s calling in today from Montana. Lots of stuff going on in the skies in Montana these days. But Adam’s going to tell us – this is a unique story. We really didn’t get to talk about it offline, but Adam, I’m fascinated by this story. I don’t know that we’ve had one on the show like it, and the show’s almost 14 years old. So I can’t wait for you to tell us this story. Welcome, and tell us this very interesting story.

ADAM: Hey, thank you, Jim. Yes sir. Basically, this story is a combination of three different stories, all of whom had told me their experience firsthand.

We’ll start from the very first one, my mother. When I was younger, I started getting into all the scary stuff, ghosts and things like that. I remember she told me a story once of before I was born, she and my father were driving home. It was somewhere in California. We lived there in the San Joaquin Valley. It’s the Dust Bowl. So they’re driving home somewhere late at night, and this thing, this creepy-crawly as she describes it, on all fours – she said it was pale, kind of looked like an old man – came crawling across the road, real quick. She and my dad both were like, “Man, did you see that? Did you see what I saw? That’s pretty crazy.” They went home, never really talked about it. That was the first time I heard about what she described to me, and I was a kid. That was back in the ’90s.

Later on, I ended up moving here to Montana, me and my beautiful wife now. While we were dating and going through that phase, we’re swapping stories and she tells me, “Hey, one time me and my friends were driving along this dirt road up here,” and they saw a creepy-crawly. She proceeds to describe almost the exact same thing my mother did. It was on all fours, looked like a skinny old person, and just crawled across, really too quick for a human. That’s when I was like, “Man, you know what?” I told her, “My mom told me this story,” and we sat there and were like, “That’s pretty creepy.” Years apart, different states.

Now, while I’m here in Montana, I got employed at this place, and the manager’s husband is there working with us. We’re swapping stories, and he tells me, “Hey, you want to hear a crazy story?” This is when they lived in Chicago. He tells me the story. He and his buddy were going through this park late at night, and he saw the exact same thing. They heard a screech, though. They were hearing it before they saw it, and when it was out on the road, he described the exact same thing that my wife and my mother described. It threw me for a loop. He’s an artist, too, so while he’s describing this to me, he’s sketching on a notepad, and he says, “And this is what it looked like” and holds it up. And I’m like, dear lord, yep, that looks like what everyone’s describing to me.

JIM HAROLD: What do you think the connection is? Do you think you’re the connection somehow, even though the first one was before you were born? Do you think it’s something unique to people’s connection with you that is allowing them to see this specific creature?

ADAM: Man, you know what Jim, I’ve never even thought about it that way. That is nuts. I think it seems to be this – I know you’ve heard the term “The Rake” or Skinwalker-esque. I think it’s one of those things.

JIM HAROLD: Okay. Yeah, wow. What’s wild is it’s all been unique, and the other one didn’t necessarily know about the other stories.

ADAM: No, sir. I didn’t tell either of them each other’s stories beforehand.

JIM HAROLD: Wow.

ADAM: It kind of creeps me out because I wonder if there’s just that many of these things running around that we don’t know, or there’s fewer and they just seemingly live for a long time.

JIM HAROLD: Well, we did have a story last year – maybe you heard it, towards the fourth quarter of last year. Someone up in the Pacific Northwest saw what he thought was a Skinwalker eating some kind of animal.

ADAM: Man.

JIM HAROLD: That reminded me a little bit of that. I believe there are strange creatures and things we don’t understand. They may not even be of this plane. They might be of another dimension, they might be of another time, they might be of another reality, and they flash through. But I do believe that there are strange creatures and strange things that we can’t explain.

In fact, my parents had a story like that when I was a baby that happened. They had stopped at this secluded place; I was back at my grandparents’ house as a baby. They saw a flash of light. Then my dad said he saw a man with a welding mask with his hand out, and then coming down the road, my mom said, “Then I saw the biggest birds I ever saw in my life!” [laughs] She called them birds, but who knows what they were. And this was not too far from the time of Mothman in the late ’60s in West Virginia. They were actually in West Virginia, but a totally different part of the state.

But my point is people see weird stuff, and I don’t think it’s everybody’s imagination. I think they’re seeing something.

ADAM: Definitely. There’s no way. Not to say that any of them are liars, but man, this is spanning years. Years. There’s no way.

JIM HAROLD: So how do you make sense of it? How have you come to peace with it? Any thoughts?

ADAM: I have just come to peace with there’s things out there that we’re probably never going to get and understand. I just try not to think about it. Hopefully I don’t lay eyes on him. My mom says she never wants to see it again, and so did the other two. So I don’t know.

JIM HAROLD: I’ve got to tell you, I feel the same way. We may never get the answers, but it’s very interesting asking the questions and exploring the stories. Thank you for sharing yours on the Campfire today, Adam.

ADAM: Thank you, Jim. You’re awesome.

JIM HAROLD: Next up on the Campfire we have Solomon. His friend Oliver told him about the show and said, “You’ve got to tell Jim this story.” Solomon started off his note to me and said that he collects self-described “cursed objects.” Then I said, “Okay, you’ve got my attention now,” and he’s got your attention, I’m sure, and he’s going to tell us this story. He’s calling in today from Texas. Solomon, welcome to the show and please tell us what happened.

SOLOMON: Hi. Thank you for having me. Yeah, as I said, I collect self-described cursed objects. This actually happened about two years ago. This is right when I had just moved in. I can’t exactly tell you the exact times, but I know it was at night, maybe around 2:00 or 3:00 – which in and of itself is odd because I’m a night person. Almost all my work life, I’ve worked the third shift, the skeleton shift. But for whatever reason, that day I was tired and asleep at night.

I wake up in the middle of the night and I look over, and it’s complete darkness. I usually have something playing on my computer, a podcast or something, just to have little sleep sounds, and it was complete darkness. I look over to my computer, and the only thing on was my keyboard. It has little LED lights that light up. I look over and I see this thing on top of my desk. I wear glasses, so I try to squint and make out what it is, but I need my glasses, so I put it on. Everything’s clear, but I still can’t tell what it is. But there’s definitely a shape on top of my desk. If I had to describe it, it’d be like if – it looked like a dog sitting, but at that moment in time, it looked very much like a person hunched over and crouched down on all fours, just perched on top of my desk.

I’m looking at this thing and I’m trying to figure out what it could be, and I give up and I get my phone. I turn on the flashlight and I aim it where it should be, and of course nothing’s there, because why would there be anything there? So I turn it off, and the shape is still there. Still vividly there is a distinct shape. So I turn on my flashlight again, and still nothing’s there. I take my flashlight and I scan the room a bit, trying to find, maybe I have something plugged in – because most chargers have a little LED to let you know it’s on. I’m looking everywhere. I look under my bed. I look into my closet, which was open. I couldn’t find anything. So I turn off my light.

The shape now has changed. Instead of just being sat perched on top of my desk, it looks like it’s about to either leap off or step off.

JIM HAROLD: Oh my.

SOLOMON: I know. When I was telling my roommate this, he immediately got very frightened and he said – he calls it monkey fear. That’s where you get goosebumps or hairs on the back of your neck. I didn’t get any of that. Instead, all I could really say to myself was, “That’s not good.” Just exactly that tone of voice, like “That’s not good.” I am no stranger to horror movies or horror stories and concepts like that. I’m one of those people that if I’m by myself or with a group of friends, I’ll talk to the TV like, “Don’t do that. Don’t go down the stairs,” or like you find a spooky closet, “Don’t go in the spooky closet.” But I find myself doing all these things that I’m telling the fictional people not to do. So at that point I tell myself, “No, I should probably wake up.” I turn on my ceiling light, and I decide to stay up for the rest of the night.

That was my first experience with the shadow people. There’s been others, but that was my first real experience with them. Like a vivid thing was there that couldn’t be anything else but a shadow person.

JIM HAROLD: So you don’t believe that it was kind of a pareidolia situation, you drawing pictures from things that were there in the dark? You think there was actually something there, coming from the haunted object?

SOLOMON: Oh, absolutely. As I mentioned earlier, my keyboard lights up, and they’re fairly bright, especially at night.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, I know what you’re talking about.

SOLOMON: So if it was anything else, it would’ve cast a shadow along the side of the wall, but this was coming from behind. There was space between the thing and my keyboard.

JIM HAROLD: I’ve got to say, it is once of those things that does make you think. The thing about cursed objects – I used to love to go to thrift stores and pick up stuff, but now, if I go get something – and I will occasionally still do things, like in our background we use for the video set for the livestreams and things – but I still wonder, am I bringing something back with me? Because I definitely think it’s a possibility.

SOLOMON: I’m not really too scared about it. I like to think of my room or my presence being sort of a sanctuary for them. Whatever these things are that have attached themselves to these items or to me, so far they’ve been nothing but nice to me. They’re curious. They’re not really malevolent. They just want to see, they want to peek about. Or at least that’s how I’ve experienced them. Oliver has some different stories, but I’ll have to have him call in to tell their story.

JIM HAROLD: Very good. Well sir, thank you so much for joining us. Fascinating story. Again, you’re braver than I am, Solomon. Braver than I am for sure. Thank you, and thank Oliver, and thanks for being a part of the Campfire tonight – and please do call in with those more stories.

SOLOMON: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

JIM HAROLD: Sarah is on the line from the Bay Area in California. She is a return caller, and she has a story about her grandma. Sarah, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us. Please tell us what happened.

SARAH: Hi, thank you, Jim. In 2017, my grandmother passed away. I was with her when she passed, and I struggled with it quite a bit. The week leading up to her funeral, I wasn’t taking care of myself. I wasn’t sleeping well and wasn’t really eating very much. The night of her funeral, after her funeral, I had my first ever grand mal seizure. It was a big event. My poor husband was with me, and he thought I died. Twice I stopped breathing. And because it lasted so long, I lost my short-term memory from about August to April. The brain’s an amazing thing; I’m very good now, and my epilepsy, as it was diagnosed, is controlled.

JIM HAROLD: Good.

SARAH: But during that time, if you know the movie Fifty First Dates, it really was like that. I wouldn’t remember things from the day before. Which made it really complicated going through my grandma’s estate. I would wake up and there’d be new furniture in the house. I hit my head a few times on a new dresser that was next to the bed. But I had a great support system.

One thing I do recall from that time is my grandma had her wedding ring. My brother, my sister, myself, and my cousin are the younger generation, and nobody really wanted the wedding ring because it was from a pretty awful failed marriage. My aunt brought up that my sister and I were married, so she would like my cousin to have the ring, and we said that was totally fine. I did wind up with a painting that my grandmother really loved. Hung it up, and I could’ve sworn that I hung it straight, but it kept randomly tilting. During that difficult time, I just took it as grandma saying hello. It was really comforting to me.

Eventually my husband adjusted it and he hung it straight, and then it stopped tilting. Christmas of that year, my dad surprised my sister and I – he had found two rings while going through grandma’s things, and it wound up being her mother’s wedding ring and her grandmother’s wedding ring. They didn’t have any stones in them, so my dad took it upon himself to put diamonds in them. It was a really, really special gift. I wore mine every day since getting it.

In 2018, my mom and my sister had really gotten into seeing psychics, and they invited me to go see a show. The woman’s name is Cindy Kaza.

JIM HAROLD: Oh yeah.

SARAH: Yeah, she’s done quite a few shows on Discovery.

JIM HAROLD: With Dave Schrader, yeah.

SARAH: Yeah, she’s just wonderful. I’ve always been a skeptic with psychics, but I went just for the entertainment and to see the show. I wasn’t really expecting to get a reading. The way her shows are – the place we go see it is actually a restaurant, and they have a big banquet hall. They set up chairs, and oftentimes it’s 100 people or more. The first show I went to, we wound up being right under the stage, right under her, which was kind of neat. The way she says it is she’ll do readings and she’ll get a name sometimes or circumstances and she says you have to claim it.

The show was great. I thought it was really neat and fun. She was wrapping up and I was like, okay, we didn’t get anything. She pauses and she looks at my sister and I, and she says, “Hey, where’s the third ring?” My cousin lives in Alaska. I was pretty floored because my ring I wore on a necklace under my shirt. It’s not like we were flaunting them. She gave other things that kind of sounded like Grandma. I thought it was really pretty neat. I was still kind of skeptical.

I came home, and my mom dropped me off outside of the house. I was still kind of whirling from the reading, and I said, “All right, Grandma, if this reading was real, if that was really you, can you make the painting go crooked?” I walked up my stairs and walked into my house, and I came in and I literally let out a little scream. The painting was not crooked; it was hanging halfway sideways.

JIM HAROLD: Oh. [laughs] See, my thought was if it’s a little crooked, that’s happened before. But halfway sideways, it’s like, “Yes, yes, yes, that was me.” [laughs]

SARAH: Yeah, it made me smile so much. I loved thinking that she was around still, watching out.

JIM HAROLD: Indeed, it sounds like she is. Well, Sarah, I’m glad that you’re doing better and everything has, health-wise, taken a better turn. That’s good to hear. It’s also good to know your grandma is still with you and still sending you those signs.

SARAH: Yeah. Thank you.

JIM HAROLD: Sarah, thanks for being a part of the Campfire.

SARAH: Thank you. Have a good day.

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If you love the Campfire, be sure to check out the Paranormal Podcast, where every week Jim interviews experts and authors about strange mysteries. Find it for free wherever you listen to this podcast. Tune in to the Paranormal Podcast today. Now, we return to Jim Harold’s Campfire.

JIM HAROLD: Up next we have one of our loyal livestream viewers. I don’t know if you know it, folks, but I’ve been doing this livestream, Jim Harold Live, on a semi-regular basis this year, and I’m kind of settling in to an every-other-week pattern. So stay tuned on social media and things for Jim Harold Live. It’s a lot of fun. One of our viewers who always seems to show up, and we really appreciate it, is Matthew, a.k.a. “Android Paranormal.” We’re so glad to speak with him today from Maryland. He’s going to share his Campfire story from about 15 years ago. A.P., thank you for joining us today, and good to talk with you as well as always see you on the livestreams, contributing your comments and thoughts. Much appreciated. Please share your Campfire story with us today.

MATTHEW: Thanks for having me, Jim. I enjoy joining the livestream as well. This story pretty much goes back around 15 years. It was 2008. At this timeframe, I was living at my parents’ house. Back then I was about 20, 21 years old or so. It was late one night, just a normal night like any other night. Back then I worked evenings, so I routinely stayed up late and normally went to bed a little after 3 a.m. It was just like any other routine night; I was finishing up watching some TV. I was going to let the dog out back before going to bed, just like any other night. I got up off the couch, walked to the back door, let the dog out.

This is where things start to go strange. I walked out on the deck, and as soon as I walked out there I could hear footsteps in the woods behind my house, like something was walking in the woods. I could hear steps on the dry leaves of the forest, kind of like a crunch… crunch… crunch. It was a very slow, steady pattern like that, so I could tell immediately it wasn’t a squirrel or a rabbit scampering, some sort of small animal. I knew it was probably a deer, or maybe a person for some strange reason. I was a little freaked out at first, but not really.

Then my dog’s ears perked up. She heard it too. She was looking in that direction. It was way too dark to see in the woods, to see what was going on. It was the middle of the night. There’s not much light out there. The backlight I had on the back porch was just a dim one, so it didn’t shine that bright.

But after about four, five, six steps – wasn’t that many – it stopped. As soon as it stopped, I noticed there was a little tiny light that appeared. It was like the size of a marble. It was very tiny, off in the distance in the woods. It was just outside our yard fence, which was about 20 to 30 yards away. So it really wasn’t that far, actually. About a quarter of a football field. This light appeared about three or four feet off the ground, and just about three or four feet outside of our fence. It appeared and then it started growing bigger and bigger and bigger, and when that happened, my dog took off running towards the steps on the other side of the deck. I’m like, oh great, there’s a person out here with some sort of lantern or something. I don’t know if it’s a burglar looking to break into sheds or what it is.

That’s when I started to get nervous, “Oh man, I might have to break up a fight with a burglar and my dog or who knows what.” Paranormal is the last thing on my mind at this minute. She takes off running towards it, and as soon as she jumps off the deck stairs, it gets to about the size of a basketball at the same time. It’s really big. It flickers or sparkles, and then this is when I notice this is not a normal, regular light. This is the brightest, most white, pure light I’ve ever seen in my life. It was like looking at blue or white glowing glue, like a plasma or something. It had a blue hue or glow around the outside edge. Then it sparkled or twinkled or something, and it rapidly deteriorated. It didn’t just disappear. It rapidly deteriorated and shrunk into nothingness as my dog was running towards it.

By the time she got to the d of the fence, it was gone. She got up on her hind legs on the fence, right where it was at. Now, it was on the other side of the fence, so she wouldn’t be able to get to that exact physical location, but she was within six feet of that location of where that thing was stood, within less than five seconds of when it disappeared. She got up on her hind legs and she was looking left, right, looking around everywhere. She didn’t see anything. And dogs can see in the dark a lot better than humans. She didn’t see anything run away. I didn’t hear anything run away.

I turned around, went to the motion sensor lights we had, waved my hand in front of the motion sensor to trigger it to turn on. It’s these big spotlights, floodlights. That lit up that area of the woods enough that I could see that area, and there was nothing there. That’s when I freaked out and realized something major just happened that was totally unexplainable. I didn’t run, even though I was freaked out when it happened. I just looked around and was evaluating the situation and realized, “There’s nobody here. There’s no one around anywhere in sight.” That experience changed my life.

But it doesn’t quite end there. Something weird happened a few months later that pieces together – it could be connected. It might not be connected, might be connected. Something happened in our local newspaper the following spring, so maybe six months later. They found a lieutenant-colonel from the Civil War who was buried less than 100 yards from our yard, and we had no idea that he was there all this time. So I don’t know if it was connected to him. And anybody listening is welcome to look him up. His name was Lieutenant-Colonel Ephraim Anderson. I don’t live in that neighborhood anymore, so I don’t mind sharing that. He’s got a grave marker there now. There’s a big plaque there for him. It’s a historical site now. I think they might’ve moved him. I’m not sure if they left his body there or not, but the plaque is still there.

He had a church there originally, many decades ago, I think in the early 1900s, that has since been torn down, and he was buried there at that church. But I’ve seen paranormal shows since then that made me question, maybe it wasn’t a ghost. Maybe it was something else. I have no idea, to this day, what the heck that thing was.

JIM HAROLD: So this light, you’re thinking more than a UFO or anything like that, it might’ve been more spiritual, possibly.

MATTHEW: Yeah, I think it could’ve either been spiritual, connected to that lieutenant-colonel, or – who knows? There might’ve been other graves there. It was a church. Churches have graveyards. There could’ve been other bodies back there that they never moved when they tore the church down.

Another thing that I consider is I saw, with Skinwalker Ranch, there’s been reports when the government contractors did investigations there of seeing these lights appear, these orbs appear in the field, and then entities climbing in and out of these orbs as if they’re portals or something. So I don’t know if it was something like that. Because let me tell you, this thing definitely had intelligence. It wasn’t residual because when my dog jumped off the deck, it responded by immediately deteriorating and disappearing as soon as she started running towards it. So this thing was aware of its surroundings and was aware that something was coming towards it, and it basically was out of there. It was getting out of there somehow, someway.

JIM HAROLD: It kind of died.

MATTHEW: Yeah, it was crazy.

JIM HAROLD: The thing is, when people say orbs, the first thing that comes to mind are those pictures that people say, “I’ve got orbs.” To me, I tend to be on the believing side, but those kind of orbs, I go, well, dust particles, lens flares, stuff like that. But this is a totally different kind of orb. And we’ve had multiple reports of this kind of thing.

MATTHEW: Yeah. The best way I can describe it is if you had a white beachball and you were somehow able to put an LED light inside that white beachball. It looked like that, but the brightest thing you’ve ever seen with a blue glow around it. That’s kind of what it looked like. If you took a picture of it, it would just look like a white blob, basically, lit up.

JIM HAROLD: We had not too long ago a woman who saw an orb like that behind a bush. Then maybe a few months ago, we had a woman who saw an orb something like that, although hers might have been orange, but similar kind of thing – it was following her while she was walking down the sidewalk.

MATTHEW: That’s amazing.

JIM HAROLD: It really does make you think. It makes me think that it’s real, there’s something behind it, there’s something going on. I’d be interested to see if other people out there have had the same experience. Jimharold.com/campfire to sign up to tell your story, or our Virtual Campfire Group over at virtualcampfiregroup.com on Facebook. Well, A.P., Matthew, thank you so much for joining us today. You’ve certainly given us something to chew on. What in the world was that strange orb? Thank you so much for being on the show today and sharing this fascinating story.

MATTHEW: Thanks for having me, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: Jillian is on the line from Northern England. Man, we’ve been getting a lot of callers from the UK, and I for one am absolutely loving it. She’s calling in, again, from Northern England, and she has a story about her daughter. Jillian, welcome to the show and tell us what happened.

JILLIAN: Thank you, Jim. This happened back in the mid-1990s, when my eldest daughter was a toddler. We were sitting in our home, just eating breakfast. It was just the two of us. Her dad, who I was married to at the time, had gone to work, and we were sat at the kitchen table. If I explain the layout of the house, it was a small modern house. The back of the house was a kitchen/dining room, and at the front of the house was the living room with the TV and the couch and what have you. In between the two rooms was a small hallway with the front door. So the front door was on the side of the house.

As I say, we were sat at the kitchen table. My daughter’s chatting away. I was sat with my back to the door into the hallway, and my daughter was facing the hallway, so she could see into the hallway. As I say, she’s chit-chatting away, and then she suddenly leaned across, looked into the hallway, and she said, “Where’s that man gone?” I looked round and I thought, there’s no man. There’s just us two. I could see the front door; it hadn’t opened. I could see the back door; that hadn’t opened. But when I looked back at my daughter, I absolutely believed that she had seen a man.

JIM HAROLD: Wow.

JILLIAN: I have to say, I had such a feeling of dread. I was so convinced that I said, “I’m going to have to go through the house to check that there’s actually nobody in here.” I looked in every room, behind doors, in cupboards, wardrobes, everywhere. There was no man.

JIM HAROLD: So you didn’t think of a ghost. You were thinking of an actual person in the house.

JILLIAN: Yes, I was. But as I said, there was nobody there. She had an imaginary friend at the time called Michael who lived on the stairs. I thought, “This could be another imaginary friend. Little bit creepy that it’s a man, but still, I can cope with this.” The day continued as normal. When my husband came in from work, I told him what had happened. He really didn’t believe in the paranormal. Of course, he said, “Don’t be silly. You’re overthinking this.” That was fine. I thought, yeah, I probably am.

When it got to bedtime, put my daughter to bed, and I was sat on the bed reading her a story, and she looked behind me and she said, “There’s that man.” I turned round. There was nobody there. To be honest, I was frightened. Just the fact that she was seeing this man, I was frightened. But I didn’t want to frighten her, so I just said, “Oh, he’s there, is he?” and carried on.

This went on for a few nights, but at the same time, she started to become frightened of a teddy bear that was in her bedroom. This bear just sat on top of her set of drawers in the room. She started to say it wasn’t nice. To be honest, I brushed it off to start with. “It’s just a teddy bear, there’s nothing to be frightened of.” But this particular night, she really was scared and she didn’t want to go to bed with that bear in the room. So I put it in a cupboard in her bedroom, like a built-in wardrobe. Put it in the cupboard, closed the door, settled her down, that was that.

Anyway, a little bit later on, she was crying. In fact, she was screaming. Of course, I run in – cupboard door’s open, the teddy bear’s sat on the carpet facing my daughter’s bed, and she was petrified. I took the bear out of the room, went to settle her down, and I threw the bear out. Put it in the bin. It’s probably haunting a landfill site somewhere in England as we speak.

JIM HAROLD: [laughs] So you think your daughter was definitely tuned in to whatever these different things were?

JILLIAN: Yeah. Like I said, she had this imaginary friend, and kids do, don’t they? But the fact that she kept seeing “the man,” and then she was frightened of this bear, I thought the two have got to be connected. But once I’d gotten rid of the bear, there was no more talk of the man. Nothing else happened. Life just went back to normal. But to this day –

JIM HAROLD: Did you talk about the – go ahead.

JILLIAN: She was very young at the time, but we’ve talked about it from time to time, and actually her younger sister laughs about it, “Ha, ha, remember when you were frightened by that teddy bear?” But my daughter maintains to this day that that bear came out of the cupboard and, in her words, ran at her.

JIM HAROLD: Wow, that’s spooky, for sure. [laughs] Wow, amazing.

JILLIAN: I’ve thought over the years, was “the man” something evil in the house? But she was never frightened of the man. It was just the bear. I just wonder – maybe I just want to think this – whether the man was possibly a benign entity, possibly a deceased relative that used to pop in from time to time, and maybe recognized that possibly something negative had gotten into the house. The fact that he appeared when he did, in the way he did, and frightened me, was perhaps a nudge to me, who has no psychic abilities whatsoever, I have to say. But it was maybe “Come on, there’s something in this house that you need to address.”

JIM HAROLD: Interesting.

JILLIAN: Without that, I would never have bothered about that bear. I would’ve brushed it off. I would’ve said, “It’s fine, there’s nothing to be frightened of.”

JIM HAROLD: You feel that the man was different from the imaginary friend, though, right?

JILLIAN: Yes. The imaginary friend was a little boy who lived on the stairs, and we heard about him on a regular basis. She chatted away to him. But the man was something different. There was never any conversation; it was just there.

JIM HAROLD: Very interesting indeed. Jillian, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your story on the Campfire.

JILLIAN: You’re welcome, Jim.

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Follow Jim on Twitter and Instagram @TheJimHarold and join our Virtual Campfire Facebook group at VirtualCampfireGroup.com. Now, back to the Campfire.

JIM HAROLD: Oh, we have an exciting pair to talk to today. I’m talking about Marcy and Betsy from A Funny Feeling, that great paranormal but yet hilarious podcast. They’re actually going to share a couple of their own personal spooky stories, and then they’re going to tell us a little bit about the show. We talked before, and Betsy said, “Me first, me first!” [laughs] So Betsy, tell us your spooky story, please.

BETSY: This happened last year in March. This is the first time ever where I’m like, “I think something paranormal happened to me.” I was with my sister and her family in Keystone, Colorado, and we were staying in a condo, just a nice tiny little two-bedroom, two-bathroom condo. One of the bathrooms is at the entrance of the condo, so you have to walk through the kitchen and the living room to then get to the bedroom. My nieces had gone to sleep, and me and my sister and brother-in-law were still hanging out, watching TV and just chilling. Finally they were like, “Okay, let’s all go to bed.” I was like, “All right, let’s go to bed.”

They were using the bathroom by the bedrooms. All the lights were out, and I went into the bedroom I was staying in with my nieces, and I was quietly grabbing my toiletries and stuff, and I hear from the living room a great big [sigh]. Like a dude exhaling. I thought, “Oh, that’s my brother-in-law Nate. That’s got to be Nate, getting water or something, or just exhausted from the day.” I walked out expecting to see my brother-in-law, and there was no one.

JIM HAROLD: Dun-dun-dun!

BETSY: I was looking around, and their bathroom door was closed and their bedroom door was closed. I was like, okay, what’s happening? And then it happened again. A great big dude exhale.

JIM HAROLD: [sighs]

BETSY: Yes! I saw the spot where it was coming from. It was just the corner of a room. I started freaking out. My body was like, “I think we need to flight. I think we’ve got to get out of here quick.” I started shaking and stuff. I was like, “Maybe it’s the heater. Maybe there’s a pattern.” So I waited for a hot second; nothing happened. I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to the bathroom and I’m going to get ready for bed. I don’t know what to do.” I was scared, brushing my teeth and stuff, and I kept peeking out the door. I was using the bathroom by the entrance. I didn’t hear anything. I was like, “Okay, I’m going to make my way back.” I stopped for a second. “Is something up? And also, I’m excited to tell Marcy if something is.” And then, after a minute, I hear a great big inhale from the same spot.

JIM HAROLD: Oh man, they changed it up on you.

BETSY: They changed it up on me. I ran into the bedroom I was sharing with my nieces, and I was freaking out. I was like, “I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do.” So yeah, I think there was a ghost.

JIM HAROLD: Did you talk to the folks that live in the house? Any idea who that might’ve been, who that might’ve represented?

BETSY: No, and I meant to – because it’s a rental. It was through a company, and I didn’t even know really where to begin. I did tell my sister and her family in the morning. I was like, “There was a ghost in here!” I was really excited but scared. [laughs] Yeah, that’s it.

JIM HAROLD: That’s the thing, Betsy and Marcy, that I love about Campfire a lot of times. People will call in and say, “I’ve had nothing else happen to me, but this one thing certainly did happen to me.” Kind of like your story, Betsy.

BETSY: Yes.

MARCY: I have been threatening Betsy for years that it was going to happen.

BETSY: Marcy really has.

JIM HAROLD: You manifested it.

MARCY: She was like, “I never want to experience it. I love hearing the stories, but I don’t want to go through it.” I was like, “There’s no way we can talk about it this much without it happening to you.”

JIM HAROLD: Betsy, has that changed your perspective on things? Are you the skeptic of the pair, or what do you think?

BETSY: No, I believe in it, and whenever anybody tells me stuff, I’m like, “Yes, cool, I believe you.” But I was like, “I don’t ever want to experience that” because I thought it would change my whole being if I experienced it. I thought I would turn into, I don’t know, an old schoolmarm if I saw a ghost or something. [laughs] But now it has opened me up, like, okay, I can handle it if need be. I haven’t seen anything yet, and that’s going to be the ultimate test.

JIM HAROLD: Very cool. Well, please keep us updated if you do end up seeing a ghost or something along those lines. That’d be awesome.

BETSY: Oh, I will. I will.

JIM HAROLD: And it might just happen. Marcy called it before; maybe it’ll happen again in even a bigger way. Now Marcy, obviously you’ve experienced some things. Tell us about one.

MARCY: Hi. I have so many. I’m going to do the Beechwood story, though.

BETSY: Yes.

MARCY: If anyone’s familiar with Hollywood, on Beechwood Drive – it’s right underneath the Hollywood sign – that was my first apartment when I moved to LA. It is just an iconic – everyone who moves to LA lives on Beechwood Drive at some point. It’s just a big canyon, and it has so much history there as well. I was living in a two-bedroom apartment, and my roommate’s fiancé lived in the Bay Area, so she wasn’t always in Los Angeles. I was there alone most of the time.

One night I had just gotten home from a trip and I was really tired, and I went to bed. I remember being – well, I don’t remember being asleep. I was asleep, and you know when you use a radio alarm instead of like a “beep-beep” alarm? Like the slow wakeup that you have?

BETSY: It’s in your dreams a little bit.

MARCY: Exactly. You ease into reality a bit. So I start hearing and slowly waking up because I’m hearing a man speaking in Spanish where I think is the foot of my bed. I don’t know Spanish, but I could pick it out. I had been on a trip in cabins in the woods with a bunch of friends, and I was like, “Oh, it’s one of the guys playing a prank on me.” That’s what my sleepy brain thought. “This is someone playing a prank.” I literally said out loud, [muffled] “Shut up!” because I was paralyzed. I was trying to say “shut up,” but I was paralyzed.

And then I got this overwhelming feeling of anger, that I’d made someone mad, and pressure on me, like atmospheric pressure. I describe it almost as those Gravitron machines at the fair that push you against the wall.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, the Rotor.

MARCY: Yeah, pushing me into the bed. Then I was like, “Oh no, someone’s in here.” I put my face into the pillow, and I was immediately very awake then.” I was like, okay, fight or flight. So I sat up and screamed, “Hey!” really loud. Then the air changed. Everything was gone. I was like, “Okay, that was really weird.” I wake up and do what every grown woman does, I call my mom. [laughs] She’s in Louisiana. She’s two hours ahead. It’s like 7 a.m. She knew something was up if I’m calling her that early. She’s like, “What’s wrong, what’s wrong?” I tell her the story and she’s like, “You need to get holy water. You need to get a priest. You need to go to church.” I was like, “I think it’s okay. I addressed it and it went away. I think it’s okay.”

That night, I come home from work, still really exhausted – especially because I woke up at 5 a.m. – and I have my old iPhone, because this is 2011. Those much smaller ones. But it’s at 35%. I remember so specifically, 35%. I plug it in to charge it while I’m asleep, and I casually say out loud, “You better not wake me up tonight.” Just putting it out there for my friend at the foot of my bed. So I go to sleep, no incident.

In the morning, I wake up and the sun is coming in really bright. I was like, “Oh no, did I oversleep?” My phone had been turned off. It turned off at some point during the night and was fully charged. And if anyone has an iPhone, even if your phone dies, if you charge it, it reboots. So for it to power down, I was like – I think I made him annoyed. I’d been antagonizing him.

BETSY: You got him mad. “I’m going to mess up your schedule, dude.”

MARCY: Telling him to shut up and leave me alone.

JIM HAROLD: So it was manifesting itself with electronics. Interesting.

MARCY: I was like, “Okay, I’m not addressing him anymore. I’m ignoring him.” I didn’t really feel him for months. Then I had a friend from New York come to stay. My friend was staying in the living room. My bathroom was an ensuite. I was like, “Don’t use my roommate’s bathroom. She doesn’t know you.” But he was doing his own thing. We were going about our lives because he was visiting the city more so than me.

At one point during the week, I remember going to sleep and feeling like, “Oh, the man is back. I can feel him at the foot of my bed.” I just knew that he was there, but it didn’t really scare me. I was just like, “Eh, he’s here. I wonder if he’s just checking out who else is in the place.” I come home a few nights later and my friend sits up in bed in the living room, on his air mattress, and was like, “I need to go to the bathroom!” I was like, “Yeah, you can go to the bathroom.” He was acting really strange.

Then on his last night, we went to dinner, and he was like, “The other night, when you came in, I had been holding it all night long because someone was in your room.” I was like, “The man! There’s a ghost in my room.” He was like, “No, no, I think there was a person in your room,” because he doesn’t believe in ghosts. I was like, “No, it’s a ghost.” He tried to go in there and got so scared that he literally wouldn’t go to the bathroom until I came home.

BETSY: Aww, that’s so sad.

JIM HAROLD: Who do you think the ghost is, or was?

MARCY: I don’t know, but I moved out of that apartment and two friends moved in.

BETSY: Yeah, we’ve had a bunch of friends who’ve had experiences in that apartment.

MARCY: We have at least four other friends who’ve had experiences there. When our friends John and Nicole lived there, Nicole saw a man standing in the living room. They one night were up late, watching videos, and they heard someone clap in the other room. I know that John said that once a glass flew off – he said “flew,” but it just fell off his desk. I used to wake up to all the cabinets being open, but I was like, “I guess we’re having earthquakes.” I don’t know, I was new to LA, I didn’t know. [laughter]

And then when they moved out, another friend moved in, and I was like, “Dan, it’s haunted.” He was like, “No, it’s not. I don’t believe in ghosts… but my roommate does see shadow people.” And then one day, he was talking to a neighbor – and this neighbor had lived there for 30 years – and the neighbor was like, “At one point in lived in your unit, and when I moved into it, it had been maybe a drug den or something.” It was trashed. It just looked like someone having a rough time had lived there before him. And in the smaller bedroom, there were child’s drawings on the wall of people crying and stuff.

JIM HAROLD: Ooh. Oh.

MARCY: So that’s where we’re at so far. My friend still lives there. Besides the occasional haunting, it’s a great location in LA.

JIM HAROLD: [laughs] Aside from the atmospheric pressure when you’re trying to sleep, it’s fantastic. Well, two great stories, and again, it proves that this happens to everybody, podcasters included. How do you like that segue? Speaking of podcasts, Marcy and Betsy have a great podcast, A Funny Feeling. Why don’t you guys give us a couple minutes on what the podcast is, what people can expect, and where they can tune in?

BETSY: Well, when we started, it was just like, how do we listen to our friends tell us their paranormal stories? Because we love hearing them.

MARCY: That’s always my icebreaker: “Have you seen a ghost?” When I meet a new person, I’m asking that in the first conversation.

JIM HAROLD: That’s a good one.

BETSY: Usually it’s like, “No – well, I don’t really believe in them, but I have seen…”

JIM HAROLD: Exactly. “I don’t believe in this stuff, but there was that one time…”

BETSY: Yes! It’s so fun. So our podcast is we invite a bunch of friends and guests on to hear their paranormal experiences. And it ranges from straight-up classic firsthand ghost stories to premonitions to honestly just recurring weird nightmares. Kind of anything and everything that people are like, “I don’t know what this means, but this happened to me.”

MARCY: I always say Mano’s story about the monster in the doorway. When he was staying at his brother-in-law’s place in Greece, this 1,000-year-old home, literally, there was a big monster being in the doorway. It’s the craziest story, because then his brother-in-law was able to back it up and be like, “I know what you’re talking about. I used to see him.”

JIM HAROLD: Whoa. Incredible.

BETSY: Yeah.

JIM HAROLD: And you guys have fun with it, too. You guys come from a comedic background, so you have some fun with it as well, right?

MARCY: We started out inviting on our comedian friends, other actors. We have expanded – during the pandemic, we got a little bit lazy and just started reading –

BETSY: We’re still a little bit.

MARCY: [laughs] We’re still a little lazy. We have so many listeners write in with their stories, so right now we’re doing mostly listener stories where we just read or listen to them, and then we have a lot of commentary. And as you can tell, we cut each other off a bunch and we just make jokes.

BETSY: Yeah, we just talk over each other the whole time. [laughs]

MARCY: But we believe people, and we also like to have fun with it and say what we think it could be.

JIM HAROLD: That sounds like a great time. So the important question is, give us the name again and tell us where we can find the podcast.

MARCY: A Funny Feeling podcast. I think we’re wherever podcasts are found, and we’re on the Headgum Network.

JIM HAROLD: Very good. Well, Marcy, Betsy, thank you so much for joining us, telling your own spooky stories. I hope that everybody checks out A Funny Feeling everywhere fine podcasts are heard. Stay spooky, guys!

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You’re listening to Jim Harold’s Campfire.

JIM HAROLD: Deanne is on the line from Atlanta, Georgia area, and we’re so glad that she’s here, return caller. She has a story that kind of ties in with another story we had today. There are some parallels. I’ll let her tell the story and then we can comment on that further. Deanne, welcome back to the show. Thank you for all of your support. I know you listen to this show and our other shows. Please tell us your story.

DEANNE: Thanks, Jim. This takes place – it starts out in 1993. I was married to my ex-husband during this time. He was an alcoholic and over time got more and more abusive, which is why he eventually became an ex-husband. But we were married at this point, no children yet, and we were living in an apartment. My father-in-law had just passed away, and what was ironic is that he passed away 15 years to the day, to the hour, to the minute, that my mother-in-law had passed away, which was just crazy. I don’t know if that’s supposed to be a sign they were together, but anyway.

My husband and I had gone out to dinner, and he was getting all sad about everything that was going on, and we came back home and the TV was on. Back at this time, this was not streaming channels or anything. This is when you’d plug a coaxial cable into the wall to get your cable channels. Whatever channel you turned your TV off on, that’s the channel it’d be on when you turned it back on again. We walk right past the TV when we leave, so it was definitely off. We came in, TV was on, and it was up to Channel 900 something – something we would never even have. Our channels didn’t go nearly that high with our cable.

I took that as a sign that maybe his parents were listening and everything, so I thought, “Okay, that’s a nice thing.” Shortly after that, we moved to another apartment. This apartment was about a mile away from the Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park. There was a battle that was fought there back in 1864 during the Atlanta campaign of the Civil War. That could be relevant; it could be not. I’m not sure.

I became pregnant a few months before we moved into this apartment, so I was pregnant when we moved in, and then we noticed pretty early on that we were having trouble with this dining room chandelier. The chandelier was flickering all the time, just flickering, flickering. But what was odd was I said to my ex-husband, “It’s crazy, it almost looks like somebody’s tapping out Morse code. This is not normal flickering stuff.” It almost looked like messaging. I didn’t think anything of it. We checked the bulbs, we tightened the bulbs, we changed the bulbs, we did everything we could. We couldn’t figure it out. It kept doing this. We contacted the superintendent, who came and did the same things. Couldn’t figure out anything. He says, “I’m just going to replace the chandelier.” Replaced the chandelier – still continued to happen. We were like, “This is just crazy. What’s going on?”

But over the time that we were in that apartment, the negativity in our marriage got far worse. Really, really brought out an even worse side in my husband. My daughter was born while we were in that apartment, and when she was about nine months old, I had laid her down for the night and I had the baby monitor and was listening in. She always would sleep straight through the night at this point. You put her down, she’s down for the night. So I’m listening and I hear her up. I go in, and she stands up.

Normally she’d reach up for me to pick her up out of the crib, but she looks at me but then she turns and looks over my left shoulder. I’m watching her, and she gets this big smile on her face, and then she reaches her arms out. I turn and I follow her gaze. I’m like, “Where is she looking?” Wherever she was looking, whoever it was had to literally be hovering over my bed in my bedroom, because her crib was in our room at this time. I was looking back at her and looking back over there – I see absolutely nothing, but she’s definitely reacting to something and putting her arms out. I was like, “That’s kind of crazy.” I didn’t know what she was seeing or who was around her.

But some time shortly after that, maybe a month or so later – my ex-husband was working nights at a restaurant, so I was in bed, he wasn’t home, and I went to sleep, and then suddenly something woke me up. I don’t know what. I wake up and I’m facing the middle of the bed, and I see, crawling across my husband’s pillow, heading right towards me, this black figure. It looked like a lobster and had the tail of – oh gosh, I can’t think of it now. [laughs] The stinging –

JIM HAROLD: Scorpion?

DEANNE: Scorpion, thank you. It was jet black, scorpion tail, black lobster. And I’m seeing these claws, clamping up and down as it’s heading towards me. I could actually see its face, and the face was turned down. It had a really angry look on its face, and it’s clomping across this pillow towards me. I went, “Whoa!” and I jumped out of bed. I had hall light coming in, but I could see this thing really clearly. I flipped the light on in the bedroom and couldn’t find it.

I shut the bedroom door and went out and sat in the living room and waited for my ex-husband to come home from work. He’s like, “What are you doing up?” I was like, “Something really weird happened in there. You need to go check the room and look for this thing.” Of course, there was no sign of it. But the strange thing is that the next morning, we got a phone call from his sister that her husband had passed away.

JIM HAROLD: Oh my.

DEANNE: Over the years, I’ve thought about it and I’m like, was that a death omen? I don’t know. It was just crazy, but it was terrifying to wake up to that. So we just had odd things like that happening while we were there, and the fact it was so close to the battlefield – and I didn’t know, is my daughter interacting with a spirit from there? Or is just this apartment haunted? What is this?

A few months later, we bought a house. When my daughter was about the age of three or four, when they can really communicate better, I said to her, “Run upstairs and get your shoes and we’ll get out.” She stops at the bottom of the stairs and she looks up and she’s like, “Um, Mama, can you come with me?” I’m like, “Your room is right there at the top of the stairs. Just go grab your shoes and let’s go.” She looks up at the stairs again, she looks over at me, and she goes, “I don’t want to go.” I said, “Why?” She said, “Because the man is up there.” I said, “Who’s up there?” She said, “The man. I don’t like him.” I said, “All right, I’ll go up with you.”

We started to see more and more of this kind of stuff. And it wasn’t the kind of thing where she was trying to get out of doing something. She was with me in the garage one day and we were cleaning the garage, and she’s exploring toys she forgot she had out there. There was one half of the garage that was totally clear, so I said to her, “Why don’t you go play over there? There’s a lot more room.” She looks at me and she goes, “No, Mama, because the man’s there.” I said, “Where is he?” She pointed to an empty corner of the garage. She said, “He’s standing right over there.” I said, “Okay, you can just play over here by me.” I knew she was seeing something. I didn’t want to tell her she’s being ridiculous and not seeing anything.

But this was happening quite a bit, and I know that I’ve heard at least two other callers very similar to this. It’s been young females that have seen something that they call “the man.” My husband and I decided one night we’d ask her, “What does he look like?” She said, “He’s a black man.” At this stage my niece had a friend that had really yellow-blonde hair, and she used to call the girl “the yellow girl.” So I was like, I don’t know if by “the black man” she means it’s just somebody who has dark hair, does he have dark skin? We didn’t know. We couldn’t get anything more out of her just because of her young age.

Oh, I’m sorry, then I said, “What else can you tell me he looks like?” She goes, “Like a soldier.” And then she just skipped off. I turned to him and I said, “How does she even know what a soldier is?” She was so young, I don’t even think she would know what a soldier was yet. So that’s what made me think that maybe it was something having to do with the other apartment, since we were so close to the Civil War battlegrounds, and maybe something followed us to our new home.

But I know from one of the two calls about “the man,” one of them, the older sister had gotten a glimpse of it in her call, and she said it was a shadow figure. So then I’m thinking when she said he’s a black man, does she mean all black? But she’s long since forgotten. She has no memory of this at all, so can’t get any more information out of her. But she continued to have issues with “the man.”

At some point we were moving into another house. She had one of these electronic doorbells on her bedroom door. You push the button, it’s battery-operated, ding-dong. My sister was going to come over and help me pack. I was in the room next door to my daughter’s, and I hear ding-dong, ding-dong. I’m like, “Okay, come on, I’m over in the other room.” I expected my sister to come and thought she messed with the bell. She doesn’t come over, and I’m like, “Hey, you there?” I get up and I look and she’s not in the house. I look outside; her car’s not there or anything. I’m like, that is really odd. This thing just started ding-donging. Maybe it didn’t want us to move, I don’t know.

And the house itself that we rented that time was only three years old. It was a young family that was moving out, and they were getting a divorce. So it’s not like it was an old home or anything like that. I don’t think there’s any history of the home that would do that. Anyway, then we moved into a new home, which is where I currently live right now. I did finally get divorced a few years later, and married a wonderful man.

But my daughter started seeing various spirits here in this house. It seemed to be focused on the bedroom wing of the home, especially the hallway. At one point she said she saw a doppelganger of her dad, my ex, sitting at her drum set. He didn’t even live here. He didn’t even live in the state anymore. She looked over and she clearly saw him sitting there.

Then one night, my husband and I had gone out, and when we left – we had a sectional sofa, so half of it was against a wall, half of it was facing the foyer, an open area, which is where she was sitting when we left. We came back and she was over in the section against the wall, but it’s much harder to see the TV from that position. We said, “What are you doing over there? Why aren’t you sitting over here?” She said, “No, no.” We said, “Why?” She goes, “There was just too much spiritual activity tonight. It was freaking me out.” We said, “What happened?” She said, “There’s just been a steady parade of spirits down this hallway to the bedroom.”

She said she saw one that looked just like me, and it went through. I said, “Did you recognize anybody else?” She’s like, “No, just various people.” She said they were going down the hall and disappearing into the end of the hallway, like it’s a portal or something. She said it freaked her out. She couldn’t have her back up against that, so she went over – that’s why she had switched positions.

She continues to see things in the home here. She attends school in Texas. I said, “Do you see things when you’re away at school or anything?” She’s like, “No.” But when she comes home here, she sees all kinds of things. I don’t ever see anything.

We got a rescue dog a few years ago, and my second husband had picked him out. We never talked about having a dog, so I said, “Why do you want a dog?” He’s like, “I don’t know, I just feel really drawn to this dog.” He saw a post, somebody was trying to find a home for him. So anyway, we got him. But unfortunately, a few years later my husband passed away. He was diabetic. Renal failure and everything. He had some issues. He was a leg amputee. He passed away in 2020.

But since he passed away, my dog is reacting to unseen entities now. He comes out of the bedroom and it looks like he’s trying to cross a busy street. He stands there and he cries and he whimpers. I’m like, “Come on, come over to the bedroom.” He won’t come. It’s like he can’t get across, like he’s being blocked. And this goes on all the time. Sometimes you’ll sit there and watch him sniffing, like he’s sniffing the feet of somebody, up the legs of somebody standing in front of him. He never growls or barks, so whatever it is, he whimpers at it and he’s afraid. He backs up and goes back into the bedroom again. He won’t come out. I typically have to grab him by his harness and drag him.

That’s continuing to this day. I don’t know what he’s seeing, but he’s definitely reacting to it. But again, it’s that hallway back to the bedroom. I don’t know what’s going on with it. I don’t know if something followed us from that very first apartment, if something followed us from the second apartment, which was near the battlefield, or if something attached itself to my daughter. When she was an infant, she had night terrors. I know that I’ve heard on a lot of these things – a lot of times people who experience night terrors tend to have some sort of connection to seeing things. So I don’t know. Maybe she was just born with some abilities.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, it sounds like it, Deanne. Well, I thank you so much for sharing these stories. Very interesting indeed. It definitely seems like she is plugged in, no question about that.

DEANNE: Yes, for sure.

JIM HAROLD: Thank you so much for being a part of the Campfire.

DEANNE: Absolutely. Thank you, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: Beth is back again. You’ll remember a while back, she had this amazing story about this UFO that she saw with her brother. She’s back, and this time she has a headscratcher for us. Beth, welcome back to the show. Seems like we just talked moments ago, but you’re back now, a few weeks later, and tell us this story about this headscratcher.

BETH: Thanks, Jim. I will start out by saying my family bought our first home in late summer of 2020. And it’s only maybe even less than 10 miles from where my last story took place. As soon as we moved in, it was strange things happening. Anyway, we’re a little ways out of town. No one’s walking by, nothing like that. But right from the start, as soon as we moved in, I noticed I was finding black feathers all over the property. Not like a bird had been killed or anything, but feathers of different shapes and sizes, and also dead animals all over the property. We rarely see anything living, which we thought was weird, but we were happy to be in our first house.

Anyways, I have two little boys, and all of us collectively noticed that we would hear things moving around in the woods. It sounded more like walking, like a person, the pattern of a human rather than an animal, but we never could see anything. Another thing, at about 3 a.m., I had a window cracked and I was brushing my littlest son’s teeth, and I hear this noise and I’m thinking, “Is that the TV?” But it was like a yelling out in the woods. And these woods go for miles. There’s no house back here. It sounded like a person, almost like a monotone yell, just steadily. It was bizarre. So we heard that, and the whole time, I’m telling my husband about it, and he’s kind of laughing at me because he hears these things too, but he’s more skeptical than I am, I guess.

The big thing happened when we would be outside on the porch and we would hear this walking, and we could never see anything. But anyways, he’s telling me, “You’re just hearing things.” He walks inside, and I very distinctly hear someone run across the road. The road’s maybe 30 feet from our house, but there are some trees. You don’t have a lot of visual on the road. But I hear someone run across the road, and I didn’t even tell him when I came in because I’m like, “He’s just going to think I’m hearing things.”

Well, the next morning I get up and my husband says, “You’re not going to believe this.” The people across the road from us have moved out, and there was a man that had been coming and working on the house, and he must live close by because he usually came on a four-wheeler. But he would be out there at night working. Apparently, he came to our house that morning and knocked on the door and asked my husband if we had any kids. He said yes. He says, “I think your kids have been harassing me at night.” He’s like, “What do you mean?” He explains, “We have little kids. They’re not out at night.”

This guy says he’s been working on this house across the road, and he said every night for the past 11 nights, he would hear – it would start at our yard, right around our house. We’re surrounded by woods. It would start out over there, and he said, “These kids, they’ve got to have night vision because there’s never any lights, but I hear them. They’re walking around. It’s like they’re playing with me. They’re poking at me. I’ll hear their feet, I’ll hear them run across the road, and they come over here and they get closer and closer.” And this guy explained he was retired law enforcement, so he seemed to know what he’s talking about. At least, my husband believed him.

He said, “I’ve even fired a shot up in the air,” which I personally heard a few nights prior to this. He said, “I’ve done everything I can, I’ve yelled at them, but they just keep on. I thought maybe it was your kids.” It just sounds crazy, thinking that any kids – I mean, even if they did have night vision, what kid would go out in the woods 11 nights in a row just to harass somebody who’s working on a house? It just didn’t make a lot of sense. But it was just bizarre because he explained hearing the exact same things I had been hearing with the footsteps on the road and everything.

We’ve since discovered that there is the top of a house over on that side of our house. It’s not far; it’s in the woods, but you can stand at it – it’s almost like somebody cut the top of a house off and just dropped it down in the woods. It’s totally camouflaged, but if you’re standing at it, you can see our whole yard and everything. It’s weird. I don’t think it’s people. I think it’s something else.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, that’s a strange story. As I often say, reality is stranger than fiction. It is just a very weird world out there indeed. Beth, thank you so much for sharing your story. I appreciate it. Again, please keep us up to date, if you would.

BETH: Oh, I absolutely will. It’s ongoing. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: Thank you so much, and stay spooky!

BETH: Thanks, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: Noelle is on the line from North Carolina. She has been listening to the shows for years, and she put it this way: she said, “Jim, this is a weird one.” So I’ll leave it up to her to tell the story. Noelle, welcome to the show. Thanks for listening all these years, and tell us what happened.

NOELLE: Thank you. I live in an old 1968 golf course community. Everything I’m going to tell you about all happened in this one little section off the tee of 15. There’s a little piece of the cart path that strange things seem to happen in. There’s this little house that actually sits right in the middle of the golf course. You actually have to take the cart path to get to their house. I’ve never seen anything like it. There’s no other houses like that in the community. It’s this one strange little house and the tee, and stuff happens right there.

So my daughter and I were taking our dogs for a walk. We take them out after dark. We have these cute little light-up collars we put on them. We were coming around in a loop, and we were right at the area of the tee of 15. My daughter says, “Make sure you have a good hold of Flint. There’s people there.” I said, “Where?” I looked where she was looking and I didn’t see anything. She was like “Right there. They’re all in black.” When she said they were in black, I’m like, “Mmm…” The dogs saw what she saw. We walked up a little further, and there was nothing there. Later, she would tell me that she looked down at the dog and she looked back up, and it looked more like something was crawling towards her.

JIM HAROLD: Ooh.

NOELLE: But she shook her head and blew it off. She’s like, “I didn’t see that, I didn’t see that, there’s going to be people, we’re going to run right into them.” And there was nothing there. This is an open area. There’s no way there could’ve been anything there that I didn’t see. Now she thinks that maybe she didn’t see anything that was really there.

JIM HAROLD: That is strange.

NOELLE: That’s the first shadow person story. Especially when she said she saw two people, and she said it looked kind of like one was standing behind the other, it reminded me of another extremely strange experience that I had in the same area that’s more of a You Won’t Believe What Happened To Me, creepy people kind of story. But it happened right in that same area where she was.

JIM HAROLD: Well, tell us a little bit about that.

NOELLE: I was walking my older dog by himself, and we came around to that same area, and all of a sudden there was a person sitting on the ground in the dirt. Flint went up to them and I pulled the dog back and said, “Oh sorry, I didn’t see you there.” It was just two average-looking, normal people in nice casual clothes, sitting in the dirt on the side of the cart path.

JIM HAROLD: That’s weird.

NOELLE: And what was even weirder is that there was a concrete bench. Instead of sitting on the concrete bench, they were in the dirt beside the concrete bench. It was just creepy, it was weird. I came home, I told my husband about it. A few nights later, when we went out to walk the dogs, he came with me. We’re coming by, we’re at the same place, and at first I don’t see them. I’m like, “Oh good, that was just a one-time thing.” Jim, they were lying on their stomachs in a ditch.

JIM HAROLD: What?

NOELLE: The same two people were there again, in the pitch-black, dressed like they were going to go eat at a nice chain restaurant or something. My husband tried to talk to them, he tried to ask them questions, and they literally wouldn’t respond to him.

JIM HAROLD: Do you think they were actual living human beings, or could they have been ghosts or something like that?

NOELLE: Well, I don’t know. After we saw them, we came home and called a neighbor that lived a little bit closer to the area. He jumped in his golf cart, he went down there – he didn’t see anything. I talked to his wife and asked her about the lady that lived in the house, because they’re kind of on her property, halfway between the golf course and her property, and they said, “No, she’s in her seventies. She’s a widower, and that does not sound like anybody that they’re related to at all.”

Couple nights later, this is the last time I saw them. Come around again, and the 15th tee is elevated. There’s landscaping around it. It’s one level of bushes and two levels of rocks. So it’s rock landscaping and bushes to elevate the tee up, and they were in the rocks.

JIM HAROLD: Weird.

NOELLE: I don’t know how they got there, because a couple nights later we went back again and I tried to climb up in the rocks. I’m not that athletic, but I hike and I walk about three miles a day or so. But I could not get up to where they were up in those rocks. And that time my husband tried to talk to them, they just stared at us. They wouldn’t talk back.

When this incident happened, my daughter’s – we thought maybe they were private eyes. Maybe they were casing a house across the street. Maybe they were looking for something. But they didn’t have anything with them. And after my daughter’s incident, I thought maybe they’re ghost hunters. Maybe my daughter’s not the only one that saw something. Maybe they’re paranormal investigators. But again, they didn’t have any equipment with them. If they’d had a K2 meter or something, I would’ve gone, “Yep, I know exactly what you’re doing. Fine, not going to bother you anymore.”

JIM HAROLD: That is a headscratcher.

NOELLE: It’s so weird. And it’s just weird that she saw two figures and we saw two figures. I really started thinking that maybe they weren’t real. I don’t remember – I wish I would’ve paid more attention to their clothes, like if they had the same clothes on each time. I know he had a button-down shirt on each time, but I don’t know if it was the same clothes. But they could’ve been paranormal investigators, they could’ve been private eyes, they could’ve just been strange people, or they could’ve been ghosts. I don’t know.

JIM HAROLD: Well, it’s left us scratching our heads. We don’t know. Maybe somebody out there has had a similar experience or maybe they have an explanation for it. We’d love to hear it. Noelle, thank you for your longtime listenership, thank you for sharing these stories, and stay spooky.

NOELLE: Thanks, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: Thanks so much for tuning in to the Campfire. Certainly appreciate it. We thank our storytellers. And please do support our sponsors. They make these shows possible.

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We thank you so much for tuning in today. We will talk to you next time. Have a great week, everyone, and of course, stay spooky! Bye-bye.

You’ve been listening to Jim Harold’s Campfire. Tune in again next time for more stories of ordinary people who have experienced extraordinary things.

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