Join us for favorite spooky holiday stories brand new and classic on this Christmas edition of Jim Harold’s Campfire
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TRANSCRIPT
JIM HAROLD: It’s our Campfire Holiday Special with favorite Christmas and holiday stories, new and old, up next on the Campfire.
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. So glad to be with you once again. What we do here is share amazing stories of the strange and supernatural, and today is no exception, for our Holiday Edition. Happy holidays, everybody, and Merry Christmas. So glad to be coming to you once again around this holiday time, and I hope it’s been a blessed holiday season for you, and I hope you have the best Christmas or whatever holiday you may celebrate this particular year.
One of my favorite things that we do on the show is go back and we take a look at past years and add also some new holiday stories. And that’s what we’ve done this time: we’ve collected some new holiday stories from our listeners, plus we have some great Campfire classics like this one to share with you today. Happy holidays!
Well, we have Adam on the line from Connecticut, and here is his story – not about Christmas in Connecticut, to quote that old movie, but Christmas in Vermont and something very eerie that happened to him at that very magical time of the year. But this was magical maybe in a different kind of way. Adam, thanks for coming on the show. Tell us what happened that very mysterious Christmas.
ADAM: Absolutely, and thanks, Jim, for having me on the show. It’s a pleasure. I’m a big fan of yours and everything you do.
JIM HAROLD: Thank you.
ADAM: You’re welcome. Basically, a couple years ago my family had rented out a big house in Vermont for Christmas, and my father’s side of the family is scattered throughout the East Coast, up and down to Florida, so we don’t really get to see each other that often. So we all went up to Vermont one year for this Christmas. It was a really old house. It was kind of creepy. We were there for about five days. Throughout the five days, some weird things were happening. There were some servants working there and everything, and they would tell us some stories about the house possibly being haunted.
Long story short, we get to Christmas Eve – and when we got there, me and my brother didn’t have our own room to stay in. Everybody with kids got the first pick of the rooms, so we were just sleeping on couches, and we’d sleep in different areas of the house. But Christmas Eve, we decided to sleep down in the main living area next to the Christmas tree and everything. It got to be about 2:30 in the morning, I think it was, and I woke up and I see this tall figure at the top of a pretty big staircase. The figure was sitting there, and it was kind of motionless. At first I wasn’t sure; I thought maybe someone had gotten up to go to the bathroom or was even possibly sleepwalking for all I knew.
JIM HAROLD: Or Santa Claus. [laughs]
ADAM: Exactly, that was definitely a possibility. [laughs] It was just the silhouette of the figure that I saw. I couldn’t make out any facial features or anything like that. I remember thinking to myself, though, that it almost looked like it was wearing a tuxedo or something like that. It was very strange.
It started walking down the stairs. I remember one of the first things I thought when it started walking down the stairs was how weird and strange it looked when it was walking. The best way I can really describe it is almost like it was a puppet on a string, in a way. It was very unnatural. I remember even – like I said, I had just woken up, and at first I thought I was dreaming, and I actually rubbed my eyes a little bit, just to make sure I was conscious. Because this was weird. And like I said, at first I didn’t think it was anything supernatural. I thought it was just someone in the house.
So it was walking down the stairs in that weird, weird way, and it finally got to the bottom of the stairs. It started looking around, like I could see its head tilt back a little bit, almost like someone who had come home after a long time and hadn’t been there. It was almost looking around like, “God, it’s great to be back” or something, you know what I mean?
JIM HAROLD: Ah, I see.
ADAM: The more I thought about it after it happened, the more I was thinking that that was the way it was looking. It was looking around and kind of moving back and forth in a weird, wavy way still. At this point I’m starting to get a little freaked out because I’m not sure exactly what’s going on.
And then, all of a sudden – and this completely caught me off-guard – I heard, in a very weird, deep male’s voice, it said, “Oh my love, what a mirror image we are.”
JIM HAROLD: Ooh.
ADAM: I’ll never forget it.
JIM HAROLD: I just got chills. Literally.
ADAM: Me too, just thinking about it.
JIM HAROLD: Who was it saying this to?
ADAM: That’s the thing. At this point it was still almost bobbing back and forth, and kind of looking around, and it didn’t seem to direct that to anybody in particular, which was the weird thing too. I’ve obviously gone over it in my head a thousand times, and it was very clear. The way that it sounded when this thing said it, it almost was like someone saying it in a cave. It was like a weird, echoey type thing. It was very strange. I’d never really experienced anything like that.
And I’m 100% sure that it said, “Oh my love, what a mirror image we are.” I still don’t really know what it means exactly, or if it was talking to the house. I don’t know if it was someone who previously owned the house.
JIM HAROLD: It’s interesting you said it was in a tuxedo, it was around Christmastime. So maybe it was a ghost from the past who had been dressed up for some kind of Christmas get-together or Christmas party.
ADAM: Absolutely. I never even thought about it that way. That’s a great point, actually.
JIM HAROLD: That’s what comes to mind. I’ve got to tell you, literally that gave me chills. The story is spooky enough, but that phrase, “My love, what a mirror image we are.” I mean, that’s the capper right there.
ADAM: Oh, absolutely.
JIM HAROLD: That’s probably the name of this episode, by the way. [laughs]
ADAM: Oh, that’s so cool. That is so cool. Yeah, it’s something that stuck with me. Like I said, I still don’t know – the next morning, actually, when we were all having Christmas breakfast and everything, I asked everybody – there were I think around 15 of us there, and I was like, “Was anybody up going to the bathroom or looking around the house? I don’t know if someone got a little tipsy and was just wandering.” And everybody said no. Nobody said they were sleepwalking or anything like that.
Basically, what happened to the apparition that I saw, it walked into another room that was off to the right of me, and it just never came back. At that point I wasn’t sure what to do. I just stayed there. I didn’t even get up to look for anybody. I was just so baffled, and I was up for about an hour afterward and nothing came back out of that room.
JIM HAROLD: That is absolutely freaky.
ADAM: Right. Like I said, the next morning no one owned up to it. Actually, my uncle said, after I had explained a little bit of what happened, “I meant to ask you guys, too, if anybody peeked their head into my room.” He said it was around three o’clock in the morning. I don’t think he could give an exact time because he was asleep as well, but he said he saw his door open and the light from the hallway come in, and someone peeked their head in and looked into their room. No one ’fessed up to that either. So I don’t know if it was the same thing. That was a little bit more, just something to confirm that maybe I really did see something, that someone else experienced it too.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah. Whew. I’ve got to tell you, it’s very, very chilling, what you tell. Maybe somebody out there will have an idea what that phrase means, because it could mean so many different things. But maybe somebody out there, maybe that’s a saying. I don’t know.
ADAM: Absolutely.
JIM HAROLD: We’ll wait to hear, but Adam, thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing that very chilling story, and we update from time to time when new information comes around, so we’ll ask folks out there: the mirror image statement, what does that mean? Let’s find out. Adam and I are very, very curious. Adam, thanks for being on the show tonight.
ADAM: My pleasure. Thank you, Jim. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
JIM HAROLD: Geri is on the line from Illinois, and you know, this time of the year there’s nothing better than an angel story. Jerry, happy holidays to you. Thank you for joining us, and please tell us your story.
GERI: Oh, thanks, Jim, and happy holidays to you, too. Well, I’m not really much of a Christmas person, but boy, did I have a holiday experience, let me tell ya.
JIM HAROLD: Cool.
GERI: It was December 23rd, actually, right before Christmas Eve, and at the time I was living alone in this apartment. I was living in this dicey neighborhood, which was fine with me. I liked my place. But the surroundings were a little dicey. But I was comfortable. This must’ve been the late ’90s. Between 1992 and 1999, that stretch of time was very turbulent in my life. I’d lost several important relationships and I got dumped by a lover and I was at odds with my family. Just everything was going wrong, year after year, and I just felt really, really isolated.
JIM HAROLD: Aww, I’m sorry.
GERI: Yeah, it was kind of crappy. [laughs] On this night, we were right in the middle of the holiday season, and like I said, I’m not really a Christmas person. It’s my least favorite holiday, and I was pretty Grinchy. Even more Grinchy than usual because all these things were happening.
I was standing in my kitchen, and like I said, I lived alone. There was nobody around. It was the kind of holiday sadness that a lot of people experience. I wish I’d had friends around, I wish I’d had my family, better relationships. It just wasn’t happening, and I felt this vast loneliness. Everybody had left me. There was zero holiday spirit in my head. And to top it off, it was a very cold Chicago winter, so it was like one thing on top of another.
I’m standing in my kitchen at this moment, and I’m thinking all these doomy gloomy feelings, and I hear this noise. There’s this yip and scratch kid of noise at my back door. I thought to myself, “What is that, or who is that?” Like I said, it’s a dicey neighborhood, so it’s not unusual to have some odd goings-on from time to time. So I went to the door, but when I opened the door and looked through the screen window, there was this beautiful dog sitting there, looking right at me.
I literally said out loud, “What are you doing here?” It’s as if this dog answered me. She used her nose to nudge open the screen door with no assistance from me and she walked into my kitchen. This dog was beautiful. Like I said, this neighborhood wasn’t great and there were a lot of dogs roaming the neighborhood. They were abandoned, and sometimes I’d try to catch these dogs to try to help, which was impossible to do because they were fast and I could get bit. It was always something. But this one appeared to be in very good health. She had a shiny coat and she wore a red collar with no tags. She was completely unafraid of me, so she just walks into my apartment and makes herself at home. [laughs] Yes, she did.
But the strangest part of this is that my apartment was not an easy place to find. It’s not like you could just be walking down the street and all of a sudden, “Oh, I’m standing in front of her front door.” This old building – I don’t know how familiar you are with Chicago neighborhoods, but these giant old buildings, these multi-unit buildings – the one I was in had nine units, and mine was at the top floor, which could only be accessed by using the old wooden staircase that crisscrossed the back of the structure. Those old wooden porches that collapsed from time to time, if you watch the news.
But once at the top, mine was at the end of a row of four. People who were deliberately looking for my place had a hard time finding it, so how did this dog go through all of these steps? Number one, this beautiful dog survived unscathed in a rough neighborhood. Then she climbs three steps of rickety outdoor stairs, all the way to the top. Then she selects my door from the row of all the others. Then she makes noise to get my attention. Then she opens the screen door by herself and comes in. All of these things in a row, it’s like, this just doesn’t happen on Christmas Eve. It was like I was dealing with Lassie, so I’m completely baffled. [laughs] I decided, “Okay, I’m a dog person. I’m going to take good care of her and then I’m going to try to find her owner in the morning.” So we went to bed, and she slept in my bed all night.
If somebody had asked me to my face, “Ger, you’re in a lousy mood. What would make you feel better right now?”, I would have said, “I wish there were a dog in the house to keep me company.” And then poof, one appears.
JIM HAROLD: That’s pretty wild.
GERI: It’s pretty wild. This was exactly the companionship that I needed. In the morning, I had to make a decision. I couldn’t keep the dog in the apartment. I felt sure she belonged to somebody, so I decided to take her out to go potty and then bring her to the local Humane Society to find her owner. But I didn’t have a leash, so once we got outside, she just dashed off and she wouldn’t come back. No matter how I tried to call her and I chased her, she completely disappeared.
I had never seen that dog before in the neighborhood and I never saw her again. In a lot of ways, I really wonder if she was a dog at all, or was she something else?
JIM HAROLD: Good question. Yes. I love that story.
GERI: It really happened.
JIM HAROLD: I believe that things are sent our way for a reason sometimes. I most definitely think that dog, or whatever it was – dare I say angel of some sort – was sent to you, you know?
GERI: I think she was. I think she was something that – I think she comes and goes where and when she’s needed. I can’t explain it. There were just too many coincidences for them to be coincidences.
JIM HAROLD: Yep. The thing that got me was the fact you said it was so well-cared for and it found its way to your apartment even though it seems like it was a bit of a labyrinth.
GERI: Yes, exactly. If any animal were to end up on my porch in that place, it would’ve been a raccoon looking for my garbage can. That’s the only critter that could possibly have come up there, and did from time to time to raid the garbage can. But a perfectly healthy, well-groomed, well taken care of dog coming out of nowhere, all the way up there – if you can envision the kind of building I’m talking about, it’s just not a place that you would find yourself standing in front of on accident. You have to be looking and climbing stairs, looking deliberately for this address.
And the timing. She was completely unperturbed by the weather. This is December 23rd in Chicago, back in the ’90s. It was very cold. She was in perfectly good condition and looking for me. It was just weird. She opened the door by herself, with her nose. I didn’t open the door. I would have; I was probably about to in a moment. But I didn’t have to. She did it herself and walked in like she owned the place, and stayed with me all night in my bed. She didn’t have a flea on her. [laughs]
Needless to say, that holiday got a little bit brighter. I coped with my situations with a little bit more stability inside, and I never forgot her. I still think about her every year.
JIM HAROLD: Your Christmas angel.
GERI: My Christmas angel.
JIM HAROLD: That is so cool. Geri, again, I hope you have a happy holiday season this year, and thank you for sharing that. And I hope that gives a bit of a message for folks out there who may be feeling down this holiday season: there’s always hope, and your angel may be just around the corner.
GERI: I hope she shows up for whoever else needs her. She’s out there someplace.
JIM HAROLD: Thanks so much for being a part of the Campfire.
GERI: Thanks to you, too, Jim. Bye-bye.
JIM HAROLD: Jim Harold’s Campfire is brought to you by the Ancient Mysteries Cruise and Holidaymaker Travel. I’m so excited to be going on the Ancient Mysteries Cruise #6, New York to Bermuda, coming up March 28th to April 2nd, 2023. I’ll be there; Nick Pope, UFO expert extraordinaire; Nick Redfern, author extraordinaire; Peter Robbins, also extraordinaire UFO expert and author; Micah Hanks, good buddy who is extraordinaire in his own way; and then the extraordinaire Dar Harold, and she’s with us right now.
DAR HAROLD: Oh, no, no. Thank you so much. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: But you’re going to be there.
DAR HAROLD: I am. I’m so excited to go.
JIM HAROLD: Not only, Dar, are we going to get to interface with all these great minds – and on these cruises, you really do get to meet the speakers and things. It’s a little bit different than what you would expect. You really are having dinner with them and really interfacing with them.
DAR HAROLD: Right. I was going to say, it’s quite interactive. You get to have dinner, you get to go on excursions with you guys. The best one is a night cruise to the Bermuda Triangle. Come on, people, that’s going to be fantastic. I can’t wait.
JIM HAROLD: It’s going to be fantastic. The other thing that I understand – and you know I love a good meal – you were telling me about the meal halls.
DAR HAROLD: Oh my goodness. This ship is quite different because it’s not just like you have your traditional dining or you have your buffet. You have something they’re calling the Indulge Food Hall, and it’s very much almost like a food court, but they have little screens and you can order different entrees, different kinds of food from each little place. They have Indian and they have Italian and they have healthy salads and desserts.
JIM HAROLD: I’ll be sure to stay away from those.
DAR HAROLD: Yeah, you probably will. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: There are special offers galore, including drinks, specialty dining, group shore excursion, $50 onboard credit, $50 shore excursion credit, Wi-Fi, free airfare for second person – really, the folks over at Holidaymaker Travel, Mike and Wendy, have gone out of their way to make this extremely enticing. We hope that we are enticing you, Dar.
DAR HAROLD: Yes.
JIM HAROLD: We would love to have you on the cruise with us, and we’ll have a good time.
DAR HAROLD: Yeah, it would be so much fun.
JIM HAROLD: On this brand-new ship. I was blown away. I’ve seen a lot of ships and I was watching the videos on YouTube and I’m like, okay, now there’s cruise ships and then there’s a cruise ship, and this is definitely a cruise ship. This is something else.
DAR HAROLD: Right, a three-level go-kart racing course.
JIM HAROLD: Dry slides that you can race on. Maybe we’ll race.
DAR HAROLD: Yes!
JIM HAROLD: Maybe. I’m not promising.
DAR HAROLD: No, you’re not promising? Because you know I’ll win, that’s why.
JIM HAROLD: That could be. But I’m promising you, you’ll have a great time if you go on Ancient Mysteries Cruise #6, New York to Bermuda, March 28th to April 2nd, 2023. Go to ancientaliencruise.com. Ancientaliencruise.com. And Dar, we hope to see them on board.
DAR HAROLD: Absolutely. Hope to see you guys there.
Merry Christmas and happy holidays from the Spooky Studio! Now, back to Jim Harold’s Campfire.
JIM HAROLD: Oh, it is Christmastime, the holiday season, and Courtney emailed me and said, “Hey Jim, I have a Christmas story,” and I said, “It is the time of year,” so we set up a time and she’s on the show. We’re so glad she is. She’s calling in tonight from Kansas. Courtney, please tell us your Christmas story.
COURTNEY: I was about five years old, and I have a sister and we’re twins, so we were both about five years old. I had this teddy bear, and his name was Brown Bear. He was really soft and he had these ears that on one ear, if you squeezed it, it squeaked, and then on the other ear, if you squeezed it, it played a little song, like a little lullaby. I’d had this bear since I was I think a baby, and I was really attached to Brown Bear.
Then sometime that year when I was five, the music box stopped working in his ear, and I was really bothered by that. It really made me sad even though – I mean, he was still a teddy bear, he was still great to cuddle and everything, but it bothered me that his music box didn’t work anymore. I got the idea that since Santa had a whole workshop full of elves and made toys from scratch, he could take Brown Bear to the North Pole, and either he or the elves could fix him.
My parents, I remember them trying to set my expectations, saying, “Santa and the elves are really busy. They’re probably not going to have time to fix an old toy. So maybe is there a new toy you want?” I was just adamant. I was like, “No, I want Santa to fix Brown Bear. That’s all I want for Christmas.”
JIM HAROLD: [laughs] You knew what you wanted.
COURTNEY: That’s all I wanted. So on Christmas Eve, I put Brown Bear next to the hearth so that Santa couldn’t miss him, with a little note describing what was going on and asking him to fix it. Then I went to bed. In the morning, my sister and I ran downstairs and she went straight for her stocking and presents, and I zeroed in on Brown Bear. He had been moved to the couch next to some presents and things. I grabbed him and I pressed his ear, and the lullaby played. I was really happy, and I was also not surprised. I was just like, “Oh, great, I got what I wanted for Christmas!” My parents seemed kind of surprised, but we just went on with it.
Then years later, I asked my parents how they fixed that teddy bear. My mom was really good at sewing, and my dad is good at fixing things, so I really assumed that they just fixed him. They both said no, they had been bracing themselves for my disappointment, and even that this might be something that would make me stop believing, and yeah, they couldn’t explain it.
I even called my dad a few days ago; I just wanted to double check. First of all, I couldn’t remember exactly how old I was, so I wanted to know if he remembered. He thinks I was about five. And then I also just wanted to double check again that they hadn’t fixed the bear. [laughs] He said no, and he thinks that it was a coincidence. He thinks it’s probably that there was a loose wire in the little music box thing and that it had gotten knocked out of whack and then somehow it got jostled back into place, and then it made it work again. But it hadn’t been working for a long time, up until Christmas, and then Christmas morning, first time I squeezed the ear, it started playing.
JIM HAROLD: There you go. You know what I think happened? I think Santa Claus did it.
COURTNEY: I do too. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: I think Santa Claus did it. I do believe there are Christmas miracles. I know it’s very movie-like and those kinds of things, but I think stuff like that happens. I think there are miracles in our lives, and why can’t there be a Christmas miracle? Yeah, it’s not solving the cure for cancer or anything like that, it’s not making world peace, but it was making one girl very happy, and I think that’s a very important thing.
COURTNEY: Yes. It was magic for sure.
JIM HAROLD: I think so. What a neat story. Thank you for sharing it. Merry Christmas to you and your family, and thank you for being a part of the Campfire.
COURTNEY: Thank you. Merry Christmas.
JIM HAROLD: Well, it is the holiday season and today on Campfire – or tonight, whenever you’re listening – we are talking about holiday stories, Christmas stories, and Kelly emailed us and said, “I’ve got a Christmas story!” So we said, “Come on down and tell your story.” She’s calling in today from Seattle, Washington. We’re so glad to have her on the show. Just last year, I think, she had a special Christmas story – or she experienced something. She’s going to tell us about it now. Kelly, welcome to the show. Happy holidays to you, and please tell us your Christmas story.
KELLY: Thank you, Jim. I’ve been living in Seattle for about four and a half years now, but I’m from a small town in California called Templeton, and the closest larger city would be San Luis Obispo, which is about 30 minutes south. But every year, I visit home about three to four times, and I always get to go home for a couple weeks around Christmas with my job, so that’s really nice. Whenever I’m home, I always sleep in the room I had growing up, which is pretty much the same way that it was, except last year when I was home for the holidays, my parents set up a little Christmas tree on a side table next to my bed.
JIM HAROLD: Aww, how nice.
KELLY: Yeah. It was really cute, and they put little miniature houses under it and strung those little battery-powered fairy lights on it. Which, by the way, you had to push a button really hard two times to get the lights to turn on.
One night, a couple days after Christmas, I woke up in the middle of the night and I was a little bit cold, and I saw that the top blanket on my bed had shifted. I was moving it back into place, and it’s a heavyweight fur texture blanket, so when I was touching it, I could see static electricity lighting up on it. I had started listening to the podcast, as you said, on Halloween a couple months before, so of course the thought popped into my head, “I wonder if ghosts can use static electricity.” [laughs] Right after I thought that, the little Christmas tree just turned on.
JIM HAROLD: Ooh, so you were thinking, “Oh, could this static electricity thing be ghosts?”, and then you don’t touch the tree and it comes on by itself.
KELLY: Yeah, because I always heard they can manipulate electricity and stuff like that, so I was just wondering, and then that happened right after. At first my eyes got huge and I just sat there for a few minutes, and I eventually went to bed. It’s like, ooh.
JIM HAROLD: I love that. I love the fact you were thinking about ghosts and can they manipulate electricity, and boom, they turn it on. That to me would be kind of like “signs point to yes.” [laughs]
KELLY: Yes. It’s like I was wondering that and they’re like, “Yes, we can.”
JIM HAROLD: Have there been any other ghostly encounters in your house or in your room?
KELLY: No. That was my only one. I’ve never been the person that wants to see a ghost or anything, so that was the level that I can handle. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: Not too intimidating. It reminds me of a story, a little more sinister I guess, of this woman – and this is an older story from years ago on Campfire. The caller said she worked at a funeral home, and I can’t remember the exact – the gist of it was there was a light that kept coming on. That would be strange enough without anybody touching it, but it wasn’t plugged in. [laughs]
KELLY: Oh gosh. Oh no.
JIM HAROLD: And it didn’t run off of batteries. Well, Kelly, thank you so much for sharing your holiday story, and merry Christmas to you.
KELLY: Thank you so much, Jim.
JIM HAROLD: And thank you for being a part of the Campfire.
Chuck is on the line from LA… Lower Alabama, that is, and we’re so glad to have him on the line. He’s a big fan of the Campfire and he listens with his kids when he goes to pick them up from school – Colin, Audrey, and Jamison, thanks for listening and stay spooky. Chuck has a story for us that’s just perfect for this time of the year. It’s about his mom and sister, and it does surround the holiday season. Chuck, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for listening with Colin, Audrey, and Jamison, and please tell us your Christmas story.
CHUCK: Thanks, Jim, for letting me be on. This story takes place in a river town in northeast Missouri. My mom and my sister both had gotten jobs at a shelter for women of domestic violence right before I went to college for my junior year. I didn’t really get a chance to see the place or anything like that, so I went off to college.
Then when I came back at Thanksgiving, which was the first opportunity I really had time to, I came home, saw the family, but I didn’t get a chance to see my sister. My sister was working at the shelter that entire time. There was a woman that had a couple of kids that was at the shelter. I called her up and was talking to her on the phone and telling her that I really would like to see her, and she said that lady had just left to be with her family, so if I wanted to come by to see her and talk to her, I could. I jumped at the chance. I came to the place, the address she had told me to go, and it’s this two-story red brick revival house that was built probably at the end of the 1800s.
I came into the house and immediately there was this strange feeling of – Jim, you know that feeling when you’re in a room with somebody and there’s a stranger in the room too, and it’s small enough that they can overhear what you’re saying, so you’re consciously aware of that stranger in the room? That’s how it felt in this house when you came in. But I didn’t really think much of it. My sister and I had a real long, nice talk for a couple hours. It was about time for me to leave, so we were standing up, just saying our last few goodbyes and everything when I noticed this gray cat comes walking into the room and plops down right next to my sister’s feet and starts playing with my sister’s feet.
You know how a cat, especially when it’s playing with something, will scratch with its back legs real fiercely? It was doing that to my sister’s feet and biting her feet, and I’m looking at this cat and it stops what it’s doing and just looks around the room at its level. Doesn’t look up at me or my sister; just looks around the room. I’m looking at it. I can see it breathing. I can see its hair follicles from its fur and everything like that. I’m thinking I’m looking at a real, flesh and blood cat when all of a sudden it just slowly disappears into nothing right before my eyes.
At that moment, my sister’s talking to me, and she just stops in mid-sentence and she says, “You saw something, didn’t you?” I look up at her and I’m shaking my head, “Yeah, I did.” I told her what I saw, and she just smirks at me and nods her head. She says, “Yeah, our director keeps on getting on us about letting this gray cat into the shelter. We can’t have a cat in the shelter because they don’t want to run the risk of a lady coming in wanting shelter and being allergic to a cat. So they said we can’t have that. We don’t want to give the lady a reason to leave and go back to the person that’s abusing her. So please, don’t let the cat in.”
In fact, my sister was telling me that when my mom had first started working there, she noticed our mom would get a little bag of cat food and take it with her to work. There was one time my sister was like, “What are you taking a bag of cat food for?”, and she said, “I’m feeding the cat. Nobody’s feeding the cat at the shelter.” She’s like, “But Mom, I don’t think there’s a cat there.” Anyway, she told me that and I was just like, wow, I saw a ghost. That was the first time I saw a ghost.
I didn’t think much about it until three weeks later, Christmastime rolls around and I come back home for Christmas. Then I get a phone call from my mom. My mom’s working at the shelter, and my mom was like, “Hey Chuck, is there any way that you could come to the shelter? We had a big influx of donations for the shelter, and I’ve got them in boxes. Is there any way you can take them up to the attic for me?” I was like, “Sure, no problem.”
So I come back to the shelter and come in and there’s still that same feeling that there’s always a stranger in the room. She shows me where the boxes are and I start taking the boxes up. The very first box, the second story is up this long stretch of wooden stairs. They’re painted gray, and when you walk on them, they make creaking and popping noises because they’re really old stairs. So I’m walking up the steps with a box of donations – oh, and at the top of the stairs, it opens up into this living-room-like area where there’s a small little library, I think there’s a little toy chest for the kids, and I think there was maybe even a TV. At this landing, about four feet away from the landing, the staff had erected a Christmas tree for the season.
As I’m going up the steps, I get to about the second or third to the top of the steps when I notice there’s an ornament that I guess had fallen off the tree and was right there on the steps. But then I was like, that’s kind of weird because there’s also this great big huge door with a spring that closes to the entrance to the stairs so that little kids can’t accidentally fall down the stairs. I was like, okay, somehow the ornament got here on the steps. So I go up to the attic, I put one box of the donations in the attic, and I come down, get the ornament, pick it up, look at it, put it on the tree.
As I come back down, I go and get several boxes, I go up and down the stairs probably about three or four times. About the fourth or fifth time, I’m going up the stairs, and guess what’s back on the steps right at the third or fourth step? The ornament. The exact same ornament. I look at it and I’m like, what in the world is my mom up to?
I go up and I put the next box up and I come back down, and I go over to my mom and I’m like, “Mom, why are you putting an ornament on the stairs?” She’s looking at me like I’m strange and she’s like, “Chuck, since you’ve been putting all these boxes up in the attic, I’ve been here filling out paperwork,” because a lady had just left. “I was filling out all the paperwork so that I could hand it in. I haven’t left this seat since you’ve been here.” I’m like, “That’s strange. Is there anybody else here?” She was like, “No.”
Then she looked at me real quizzically and she says, “Wait a minute. What kind of ornament? Was it a wooden ornament of a cat on its back with a red ball?” I’m like, “Yeah,” and then right about that time when I said yeah, I’m like, oh my gosh. She’s like, “I’ve put that ornament on that tree like five, six, seven, eight times. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve put that, and I’m the only one here.” About that time, the hair on the back of my neck – I’m thinking, okay, the ornament was a gray cat, and the ghost I saw was a gray cat. Was it trying to show that it wanted me to know that it was around?
It was just a weird, spooky – it was really nothing fantastic. It was just kind of a weird thing that kept on occurring. So that was basically the story of my experience with the ghost cat and the ornament.
JIM HAROLD: I look at Christmas as a very mystical time of year, and fantastic things are possible. So maybe that cat just gave you a little bit of a sign that there is wonder in the universe. Chuck, thanks so much for sharing your story tonight and also for you and your kids being loyal listeners to the Campfire. Merry Christmas.
CHUCK: Merry Christmas, Jim.
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JIM HAROLD: Derek from Florida, brand new listener, another one, and he is going to tell us about a story that’s extremely unique, I’ve got to tell ya. When you think of Christmas – I know me, I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart – visions of sugar plums, Santa Claus, happiness, gifts. Derek’s sister had a very, very different dream. You might call it the Nightmare Before Christmas. Derek, thank you for joining us tonight. Tell us about this story of your younger sister and a very spooky Christmas.
DEREK: First off, thank you very much for having me on. This is awesome. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: It’s awesome to have you.
DEREK: Thank you. I guess I’ll start off by telling it to you exactly how she told me then and how she’s told me to this very day. This happened when we were both young, in our childhood home, and we were actually still talking about it earlier this week. I’d say when it happened, she was probably no more than maybe six, and I was maybe 10, 11, 12, somewhere in that bracket.
Something that our parents used to do every Christmas morning in the a.m. was they would do the whole Santa thing while we were sleeping and put presents out there for us. Like a lot of other kids would, I’m sure, we always had trouble sleeping that night because we knew we were going to get presents in the morning. What we would do sometimes is sneak out there later and see what Santa had brought us. That’s something we often did. It was always in the early a.m. hours that we did that. We would always sneak out there and see what Santa brought us and all that stuff.
That’s what she was essentially doing. This time, I was actually asleep. Basically, she walked out into the living room, and it was very dark out there, and she wasn’t looking across the room; she started out looking down on the ground. My parents had already done the Santa Claus thing, they had already laid out all the toys we would find in the morning, so she was focused on that. She was looking at the ground because there was stuff around the tree, so she was looking at the Christmas tree and looking at the presents, the toys and stuff.
She looked up and noticed a solid black figure literally just standing there in the middle – it had made no sound. She didn’t see it when she entered the living room. It’s dark out there, but if someone’s standing out there, you can still see them clearly because we have light that comes through the windows at night from the streetlights and everything. So it doesn’t get that dark.
Basically, she looked up and saw this black figure just standing maybe, from what she explained, no more than an arm’s length away from her. She backed up a little bit and she thought it was me at first because I guess it was around my height. So she figured it was me maybe sneaking up on her or something like that, or maybe I was staying out there looking at something else. The hallway where our rooms were apart from each other, clear view into the living room, so she backed up, looked into my room just to make sure, I guess, and I was sleeping in my bed. The only other people in the house were my parents. They were passed out back in their room. So she was the only one awake.
Once she realized that she was the only one awake, yet there was still something – when she looked back at it, it was still there. It hadn’t moved. I asked her a lot about it the first time she told me, and that it could have been a shadow and tried to explain, debunk it in a way and try to find a rational explanation for it. But as she described it, it was a solid black figure, not like a silhouette. It had dimensions.
JIM HAROLD: That is chilling. So she walks out, hoping to catch Santa in the act; instead she sees this sinister, dark figure standing there.
DEREK: Yep.
JIM HAROLD: The first thing that I would say – and not saying that your sister is wrong. She did see it. What do you think – and I’m sure you’ve asked her the same question – could it have been the “Nightmare Before Christmas”? could she have actually just had a nightmare? Because kids that age, very excitable, they watch a lot of specials. I mean, that story reminds me of the Grinch, actually. So what does she say when you ask her if she had a dream?
DEREK: That’s the first thing I asked her, and I’ve asked her it many times over the years. Even to this day, she’s in her twenties now and she’s like, “No, I was awake.” She still remembers it just as clear as it happened. That’s not the only weird thing that’s happened. We’ve both had paranormal experiences in that house. As far as what happened to her, that was probably the most notable one because she actually saw something full-bodied.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, that’s very notable. I bet the next year she didn’t try to catch Santa in the act, did she?
DEREK: Oh no, no, that’s the thing. Both me and her, we’ve always been into the paranormal stuff, even since we were younger. I’ve had stuff happen to me. Later on, though – because I’ve had experiences where I’ve woken up in the middle of the night, gone to use the bathroom, lay back down, and then I’ve had a couple occasions where I heard someone whisper something into my ear. That freaked me out. I had one time where I had just woken up again, trying to fall back asleep, and it felt like someone sat down on the bed beside me. She’s had an experience where she thought she was really violently shaken awake by something in the middle of the night.
All the stuff that happened, though, especially just after awakening, I’m first going to – because I do know a bit about how the human mind works and how powerful the human brain is, and the kind of things that people mistake for paranormal activity sometimes, like sleep paralysis. When they wake up, they can’t move, it feels like. I’ve had sleep paralysis happen to me, and I knew what it was when it happened to me. This is more recently. But between being asleep and fully awake, your mind can do some crazy things. That’s why I didn’t put too much stock into some of the ones that I experienced, especially since it was so close to me waking up.
But that experience, she still remembers as clear as day. We were actually just talking about it.
JIM HAROLD: I don’t know how you couldn’t remember that one. Well, I’m glad that you’re enjoying the show, and thank you very much for sharing this very spooky, spooky story. We appreciate it.
DEREK: Definitely, man. Thanks for letting me share, and I will keep listening. I love the show.
JIM HAROLD: Up next we have a brand new listener. Sarah is on the line from Seattle, Washington, and she was introduced to the shows by Christine and Em over at And That’s Why We Drink, so we thank them for all of their support. They’re always so kind to us, and we’ll return the favor: if you haven’t had a chance to hear that mega-hit podcast, tune in to And That’s Why We Drink. Sarah is going to tell us a story from several years back and some strangeness that ensued. Sarah, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us, and please tell us what happened.
SARAH: Thank you, Jim. Like you said, this story is from a couple years back. My aunt used to live in a really, really old farmhouse in Upstate New York built in early 1800s. My family would gather there for Christmas. One year, we have dinner, drinks, everybody’s staying up late, and I decide to go to bed. I go to bed, and the way that the room was set up was that the door would open super creaky, a really creaky, old hardwood, and then the bed was on the opposite side of the room.
I’m lying down in the bed, I’m on my side, faced away from the door, and I’m lying there, tossing and turning, feeling a little bit uneasy and I can’t really figure out why. I’ve just had a wonderful time with my family. I’m finally dozing off a little bit, and right next to my ear, I can hear or feel breath. I hear “Hey!” and I turn over really quickly, and there’s nobody there. I thought, “Well, now I know why I was feeling uneasy.” [laughs] I mean, there wasn’t anybody playing a prank. I would have heard the bedroom door open and somebody walking on the creaky floor. After that, I was terrified and didn’t want to get out of bed, so I just pulled up the covers like that was going to help and stayed there till morning. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: Oh, don’t you know that’s the number one way to protect against spooky entities?
SARAH: Yeah, if you can’t see them, maybe they can’t see you. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: So then what happened? Because I know you talked to some family members about this, right?
SARAH: Yeah. The next morning, it’s daylight and I’m feeling comfortable to get out of the bed, so I patter over into the living room and my aunt is awake. I said, “Hey, I had this crazy experience last night.” I told her the story and, so nonchalantly, she says, “Oh yeah, that’s the little boy.” I said, “Please tell me more. It sounds like you’ve also met this little boy.”
She told me that she had just seen what seemed like a residual haunting, maybe, because she would see a little boy around the house. Most often she would be cooking in the kitchen, and the way the house was set up was that there was a cutout in the wall of the kitchen so you could see into the hallway next to it. She would see a little boy in old-timey clothing running down the hallway. She would also see him rolling a bowling ball up and down the hallway. So he was just a playful spirit, and it seemed like he just wanted to rile me up a little bit while I was trying to fall asleep. She seemed to think it was him. Yeah, he just kept her company while she lived there.
JIM HAROLD: Huh. That’s kind of cool. A lot of times if you go to an elder in that situation, they’re like, “Ah, you were just dreaming. It was just your imagination.” It’s kind of nice that you went to her and she said, “Oh yeah, it’s the boy.”
SARAH: Yeah, I felt validated. I mean, I know what I heard and felt, so there was no doubt in my mind, and she had had many experiences with him too. Never felt uncomfortable; he just was a friendly spirit, so yeah.
JIM HAROLD: Pretty neat story. Sarah, thank you so much for joining us, sharing that story. Welcome to the Campfire family, and stay spooky.
SARAH: Thank you, Jim.
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You’re listening to Jim Harold’s Campfire.
JIM HAROLD: Now, Julie is on the line, and once you hear her voice, longtime listeners may remember she had that remarkable call a few years back about being spooned by a demon, which is terrifying to say the least. She said, “I thought maybe you’d forget me,” and it’s like, how could I forget that story? Ick. [laughs] Julie is calling in today from Texas, and we’re so glad that she is. This is a story about a gift, and we’re so glad to have Julie with us. It’s a perfect story for this time of the year. Julie, thank you so much for joining us, and I appreciate it. Please tell us what happened.
JULIE: Thanks. This story begins in December of 2018. My husband and I were living in Germany, and the Christmas markets had opened up. Germany has the most beautiful, magical Christmas markets, so we would try to pick two or three different ones each week to go to. This particular evening, we were at a market in a little village on the Rhine River. We wandered around the market for a while and we decided to walk up and down the little cobblestone roads, looking at the shops.
We came across a little antique shop, so we went inside. It wasn’t a fancy place; it was one of those more like where stuff was just piled wherever they could find a spot. There was a big bowl full of tangled-up jewelry, so I was digging through that and I found a really cute bracelet and a cross pendant. I decided to buy those to give to my two sisters for Christmas. The cross pendant was about 2 x 3 inches and had little red jewels going up and down and across, and the back of it was silver. We bought those, came home.
A couple days later, I was packing up a couple of boxes to send to my sisters for Christmas, and I went to the sack that we had bought from the store, and the bracelet and cross were gone. I looked all over, looked in the room everywhere, went out to the car, looked in the glove box, looked everywhere. Couldn’t find them. I was disappointed; I thought maybe we’d dropped them on the way to the car. So I just sent them something else and moved on.
A few months later, my husband put on one of his coats and he felt something in the inside breast pocket – and it was the bracelet and the cross. We still didn’t think anything supernatural. We thought, well, I don’t remember if he was wearing the coat that night, but maybe he was, and maybe he put them in there and we just forgot. So no big deal. We moved on.
Fast forward to Christmas 2019. When he found those in his pocket, I had put them in my desk drawer because I thought, “I for sure want to know exactly where they’re at this year so that I can send them to my sisters.” So I go to the desk drawer to get them out, and they’re gone. I start second-guessing myself, even though I know they were in there. I put them in there so they wouldn’t get lost. Looked everywhere, looked all over the room, and couldn’t find them anywhere. I was really frustrated but I just sent my sisters something else again that year.
Then we get to summer of 2020. We were moving from Germany to Texas, and our youngest daughter had graduated college, so she was with us. Finally, about mid-September, we got our household goods delivered, and she was helping us unpack. We were each in different rooms, trying to set them up and unpack everything, and she came up to me and she had found that bracelet and that cross pendant. I was all excited and I was glad to finally find them again. I’d thought they were probably lost forever.
So I went to this cabinet that I keep my jewelry in, and I opened a drawer and I was making a big deal about it this time, and I was saying out loud, “Okay, here they are. They’re in my hand. I have them. I’m not going to lose them. I’m putting them inside this drawer. They’re going to be here at Christmastime.” I called my husband and daughter as witnesses and I said, “Okay, you guys see, I’m putting them right here. They’re not going to go missing. They’re right here.” I was happy to have them.
Three months go by and it’s Christmas 2020. I’m again getting boxes ready to send to my sisters, and I go to this cabinet, open the drawer, and the bracelet’s there, but the cross is gone. We’re not strangers to supernatural things, and at this point I’m like, “Something’s going on. I know they were here. There’s no way that it’s anyplace else. Everybody knows that I put them right here.” So I went ahead and sent the bracelet to my oldest sister, and I had a different cross pendant that I’d bought in Cody, Wyoming, and I decided to send that one to my other sister because I thought, obviously, three Christmases in a row and it always goes missing, so I’m just going to send her something else and be done with it.
So I sent those boxes. Didn’t think anything else. So 10 months go by, to one month ago, the last week of October. My husband and I are packing for a two-week trip to Mexico. I’m switching from a small purse to a large purse that I like to use when I travel, and I empty the purse and I pack it very strategically because I want to have what I need, but I don’t want it to be heavy. I’m putting things in one at a time, and I have two little zip pouches like 3 x 4 inches. I open one of them and I put a lip balm, fingernail file, band-aids; in the second one, I put in a little travel-size hand sanitizer and hand lotion, and we go to Mexico.
The last couple of days that we’re there, we’re at these pyramids called Monte Albán that are near Oaxaca, and in between the parking lot and the entrance are some vendors set up with little tables selling hats and wooden animals and little things like that. I’m walking around, and there’s one vendor that’s selling those chains that you wear around your neck that you hook your glasses to, except they’re really pretty. They’re made out of little beads that are shaped like little flowers. I buy two of those. I fold them up into a circle and stick them in one of those pouches.
We get home a couple days later and I’m unpacking, and I’m switching from the big purse back into the smaller purse. I’m taking everything out one at a time. I take out the pouch, I open it, and I scoop out the two little chains. They’re still curled up in a ball. I set them down on the table in front of me, and I look down at them and I’m totally stunned because tucked right down inside the middle of them is that red cross pendant.
I can’t believe it. First I freeze for a minute and just stare at it, and then real loud, I start saying, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe it! There’s no way! That’s impossible.” My husband hears me and he comes over there and he says, “What, what, what?” I said, “Look!” He saw the cross pendant and like me, he was saying, “No way. That’s impossible. There’s no way.”
I don’t know how it got there. I mean, it is impossible. It was empty. I packed one by one, everything in there, went to Mexico. My husband said, “Obviously the cross does not want you to give it away.” So I put a chain on it and I started wearing it, and now I call it my “enchanted cross,” but also the gift that didn’t want to be given.
JIM HAROLD: I like it. It apparently didn’t. It kept hiding.
JULIE: Either that or it didn’t want my sister to have it. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: There you go. Julie, thank you so much. I appreciate you being a part of the show. Merry Christmas, and thanks again for all of your support.
JULIE: Merry Christmas. Thank you.
JIM HAROLD: Janet is calling in from Texas. First of all, we want to say merry Christmas, and we want to say thanks to Jessica, her sister, for telling her about the show a couple years back. Janet said Jessica is a superfan of the show, so Jessica, stay spooky and thank you so much. And Janet, thank you for sharing this Christmas story. I love it. Please tell us what happened.
JANET: I was about nine years old, and my sister is about five years younger than me, so she was about four. We shared a bedroom. We had a bunkbed. My sister slept on the top bunk and I slept on the bottom. My parents’ room is directly across from our room, and it was connected by a hallway that led into the living room, so you could see a corner of the living room from the hallway. We also had a garage in the backyard.
It was Christmas Eve, and I was so excited for Santa Claus to arrive. My parents always made a big deal about Santa Claus coming, so we had to be good kids and we had to go to bed when we were supposed to. But I guess I was determined to catch Santa Claus that night because I stayed awake. It was probably the middle of the night, and my parents were still awake. My dad was outside in the garage working on our Christmas gifts. We got bikes and a swing set that year, so that’s probably what he was working on.
I heard my mother go outside because our glass door made a loud noise when it opened, and it’s always done that ever since we moved in. A little while after that, I heard another noise, something I’ve never heard before. It was the sound of a glass door opening smoothly, like a soft swish. It alarmed me because the door has never worked before, so right then I knew something was different. I waited and I listened, and I heard the soft jingle of a small bell. I was like nine, so I thought, “Oh my God, it’s Santa.” I heard things being messed with in the living room. My mother had this stack of magazines she collected on the coffee table. I got up slowly and my bed made a creak, and I waited because the noises in the living room had stopped.
I got up quietly and I peeked down the hallway, and there was this little Caucasian man sitting on our couch. I only saw the top of his head because he was reading one of my mother’s magazines and he was peering over the top of it, looking at me. The top part of his head was bald, and he had wisps of white hair on the side of his head. He had these gold, delicate wireframe glasses and he had really big eyes, or maybe he was just in a state of shock or surprise and that’s why his eyes were so big, I don’t know.
I had the feeling that I’d witnessed something I shouldn’t have, and I immediately went back to bed, and I waited and I listened. I heard some rustling and then silence. I didn’t even hear the door open like it had before. I was still awake and the glass door made that horrible noise when it opens again, and that’s how I knew it was one of my parents. I jumped up and I ran to the living room, and my mother scolded me because I was still awake and I made a mess of the living room because magazines were scattered everywhere. She told me that good girls aren’t supposed to be awake at this hour.
I was trying to tell her of the little man sitting on our couch, and she thought I was lying. She was really upset with me. Then the next morning was Christmas as usual. To this day, I think she thinks it was a dream I was having.
JIM HAROLD: Was this man with the bald head and the gold wire-rimmed glasses wearing red and white by any chance?
JANET: I have no idea because the magazine was covering him. He was so small that the magazine was covering his body. You only saw the top portion of his head. My idea of Santa was not that. Maybe he was an elf because he was so small.
JIM HAROLD: Maybe that’s how Santa gets down all those chimneys, though. Did you ever think of that?
JANET: We didn’t have a chimney, though.
JIM HAROLD: He has methods. I won’t disclose them.
JANET: It was magical methods because he was able to open that glass door like it’s never been opened before. That’s why I was like, something’s wrong. [laughs] This is odd. I don’t know.
JIM HAROLD: Well, there you go. Janet, thank you for sharing this special Christmas story. Merry Christmas to you and your family and Jessica, and thank you for being a part of the Campfire.
JANET: Thank you. Merry Christmas back.
JIM HAROLD: Next up we have one of our favorite callers, Starra. This time of the year, we think about different things in the sky, like the star in the sky and the biblical tale and so forth. But Starra saw something else in the sky around Christmastime, and she’s going to tell us all about it. Starra, welcome back to the show. Always a pleasure to speak with you. Tell us what happened.
STARRA: Thank you, Jim. I love your shows. This was last year, Christmas season of 2021. It was the week before Christmas, so next week, that’ll be the anniversary, and I really hope nothing happens on the anniversary. [laughs] Anyway, I live in Beacon, New York. That’s 90 minutes north of Manhattan. It’s right along the Hudson River just south of Poughkeepsie, for people who know that area. (You’ll hear some meowing; that’s my cat.)
I didn’t know when I moved here from California five years ago this is known as the – there’s a phrase called the Hudson Valley UFOs because there’s been a lot of sightings around here. I always thought, well – I mean, I do believe. I truly do. I believe in all this kind of thing. But it was always other people that see UFOs, not me.
Anyway, the week before Christmas 2021, it was a Thursday night, I believe. I live on Main Street in this cute little town of Beacon. Again, kind of a touristy town. There’s shops and restaurants. It’s really cute. I’m on the third floor of a red brick building right there on Main Street, so I’m high above. I’m lying on my couch watching TV with the lights off. I like to see TV with the TV light. Right out my window – I have these two tall windows in the living room, really long windows, and I have the blinds up to see everything, and I see right above the streetlight – I’m looking at it right now – literally across the street, 20 feet away, I see three huge – it looks like car headlights in a row. Perfectly symmetrical in a row, just hovering right above the streetlight.
Planes go by because across the river here in Newburgh, there is a little airport called the Stewart Airport. A few flights go out of there, so I’ve seen planes go by. But that’s way up here. This was not a plane. I looked at it and looked away, and I’m like, “Wait, what was that?” I looked out again, and it’s hovering there. It’s really close. I’m like, “What is that?” In the back of my mind, I am aware of Hudson Valley area and what goes on here, but I kept thinking, to protect myself mentally, “Maybe this is a military thing. It’s got to be some sort of military thinking.”
Anyway, I went to the window and I’m tucked away, looking through the window, not straight in front because I’m like, “What if they see me?” I don’t know. [laughs] I’m looking out the window and it’s, again, just hovering there. Three huge white lights. It’s really dark, so I can’t see the body. But then, after about 60 seconds, the lights turn to the right, and then I start to see a shape. It starts rising up way above the street line. There’s a tall building right across from me, a red brick building. Used to be the firehouse in the 1880s. They have a plaque on there. It’s a store that sells blown glass now, Hudson Beach Glass.
I walk around the Christmas tree to the other tall window because now it’s moving, and I keep looking. I didn’t have time to get my phone. I know, people have said, “Why didn’t you take a picture?” I said, first of all, I thought it would just be gone. And I still – it’s like, you can’t believe what you’re seeing. I kept thinking in my head, “It’s got to be military, it’s got to be military. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”
So I went to the other window, and it raised up even higher. Now I can see the body of it, because even though it was dark, there are streetlights here. It’s not totally pitch black. The body of it was darker than the night, and there were two little red lights on the tail. It was a triangle. I’ve heard of a lot of people seeing these black triangles. Anyway, triangle, and it goes up over the building right across the street from me, the Hudson Beach Glass. Now I see how the shape of it is a big triangle, and it had to be like from my floor to the ceiling of my apartment, but even higher, so probably had to be 50 feet high. It wasn’t like a thin little disc or something like a stealth flyer that the military would use. It was big and thick and huge. It was like if someone cut the biggest airplane you could think of in half, and half of it you shaped into a triangle. That’s how big.
JIM HAROLD: Wow.
STARRA: It just hovered. I never heard a sound. And the glass in my windows cannot be that thick. For that huge thing not to make a noise – you know there was an engine in there, or something moving it. It didn’t make a sound. It just glided down out of sight, down to the Hudson River.
JIM HAROLD: I heard a similar story – someone in Texas; actually, we haven’t aired this story yet – from another podcaster. They saw something that was a diamond, and these large, silent craft. It reminds me, there was a flap in Europe somewhere – it might’ve been Belgium, where people, I think in the ’80s, were seeing black triangles. I remember the late Peter Jennings, right before he got ill, did a special on ABC, major television network, about UFOs and some of the reports. He shared a report about a large, black, very silent triangle. So that’s what it reminds me of, Starra. I don’t think you’re the only one.
STARRA: Oh my goodness, I didn’t know Peter Jennings did that. Wow.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, it was one of his last things before he got ill. It was a very good show. I wish we had more journalists taking serious looks at this sort of thing.
STARRA: Can I add one more thing?
JIM HAROLD: Please do.
STARRA: About three weeks later, I went to my hairdresser – this is so typical of hairdressers – and I told her what I saw, and she was like, “Wow, you’re kidding me. I saw in the Poughkeepsie newspaper” – again, Poughkeepsie is just 25 minutes north of me.
JIM HAROLD: Right. I’ve been to Poughkeepsie, believe it or not.
STARRA: Oh, have you? Okay. So a guy got on video three white lights, and he said it was a diamond. You couldn’t see; it was kind of dark, of course. He and his son were on the video saying, “What is that? What is that?” It was just hovering there. They said, “It’s hovering.” He said it was the shape of a triangle. Anyway, then I looked up the video, and they had put it in the Poughkeepsie newspaper. That was just three weeks after what I saw, and again, that’s only 25 minutes away.
JIM HAROLD: There you have it. I believe it’s real. I believe these things are in the skies. As to what they are, I don’t know. But I do know you also have a book out, and this book is Christmas themed, right?
STARRA: Yes.
JIM HAROLD: Tell people – we’re on video, but we’re doing the show as audio, so tell them what we’re seeing here.
STARRA: I can’t help doing the video. S.K. Andrews is my author name, and it’s called A Kelly Society Christmas. The Kelly Society is the name of a fictitious paranormal cleansing team, ghost hunter type of team, in Northern California. It’s the second book. It’s a little novella. I just did a book review with Black Tie Tours. Got some good reviews. And it is on Amazon. Also, my sister, in celebration of the book, gave me this bottle you can get on the internet. It’s called Krampus Off.
JIM HAROLD: Oh my.
STARRA: Yes. It’s about – the head psychic paranormal cleanser of the paranormal team has to save her young friend Josh, who’s the high school kid, the local barista at her coffee shop, from Krampus, the Christmas demon. He thinks he stole a toy, but he was mistaken. But he didn’t care. He wanted to drag him to hell. So she has to save her young friend Josh, and she has to get all ready for Christmas at the same time. It’s cheeky, it’s funny, it’s spooky, it’s romantic. Anyway, be sure to get your Krampus Off Elixir. And then she gave me a plate with Krampus on it as well.
JIM HAROLD: There you go. Krampus. We just re-released a show for our Plus members on Krampus on the Paranormal Podcast. Fascinating character, although I would not want to run into him.
STARRA: No.
JIM HAROLD: Tell people one more time the name of the book and where they can get it. One more time.
STARRA: A Kelly Society Christmas, and my author name is S.K. Andrews on Amazon. And skandrews.com. Right now I’m doing a 25 Days of Christmas blog posting every day till Christmas day, and it’s about little things you can do to keep Krampus away from your holiday.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, let’s keep Krampus away, but always good to talk with Starra. Starra, thank you for being on the show. Happy holidays, and stay spooky.
STARRA: Thank you, you too.
JIM HAROLD: Well, I hope that you enjoyed that as much as I did. That was a great time. Really enjoyed looking back at some of our favorite holiday stories from the Campfire and adding some new ones to the mix.
Again, as I said at the beginning, I hope this is a blessed and happy holiday season for you. I thank you so much for everything you’ve done for us and for the shows, and looking forward to a great 2023.
Now, on the Campfire, we will be back next week with a look back at 2022 and some of our favorite stories from the past year. I know people love those compilation shows, “Best Of” shows, we call them, and I hope that you will enjoy it. Until then, merry Christmas, happy holidays! Have a great one. We’ll talk to you next time. Stay safe, have a great time, and 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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