An imaginary friend who may have been something much more, full body apparition, a Ouija story and more on this edition of Campfire!

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TRANSCRIPT

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KEVIN: “You’ll never believe it,” she says. “Our Celine” – who’s her little sister; she’s about six years of age – she says, “She started to say that she’s got an invisible friend, and this invisible friend goes by the name of Zazabe.”

JIM HAROLD: Imaginary friend, huh? Well, I think we know better – 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 and so glad to be with you once again, and thank you for joining us.

A quick note before we get right on to those Campfire stories, because we don’t dally very much. We’re doing more additional podcasts than ever here at the Spooky Studio. One that’s not quite spooky but a lot of fun is called You Won’t Believe What Happened To Me. We did that a little bit last year with Dar, my wife, and that was great fun. We kind of revamped it a little bit this year; we just release our first episode of the new format yesterday, so I hope you’ll check it out. It’s You Won’t Believe What Happened To Me, and it’s about people’s stories of incredible things that have happened to them. Think Campfire without the ghosts. [laughs] We’ve tweaked the format a little bit, so check it out. It’s over at jimharold.com, and of course, it’s on all your favorite podcast apps. You Won’t Believe What Happened To Me with me and Dar Harold. I hope that you like it. Let me know what you think, and please do check it out.

And do check out these great Campfire stories, and here they are.

Next up is my buddy who’s joining us today, Becky from Los Angeles. At least, her husband Charlie calls me her buddy, like “I heard your buddy on the radio” or “I heard your buddy on a podcast.” So Charlie, I’m very glad that you said that. I think that’s so cool. And “buddy” Becky, welcome to the show to tell your story. Really appreciate you coming on the show.

BECKY: Thank you so much. I’m so excited. I grew up in a small ranch town up in Northern California, and when I was three, we used to go and visit my great-grandmother all the time, and my mother and I had walked over there, and she had a heart attack while we were there. So when I was three, I witnessed my grandmother pass away. It was really traumatic. My great-grandfather was so distraught that after the funeral, he decided he had to leave for about a month. We were in the process of moving to another place in California, and during that time we needed a place to stay, so we decided to stay there.

I always felt a presence there and I was always scared. One day my mom had put my baby brother and I down for a nap. My great-grandmother had given me this necklace that had little beads on it, and I used to love to stick it in my mouth. I was sitting there, lying on my bed, sucking on my necklace, when she appeared at the end of my bed, and she’s like, “Hey, Becky, don’t put that in your mouth.” I looked up and went, “What?” She said, “Don’t suck on that. If you suck on that, you’re going to cause your parents more grief.” I’m like, “What?” She said, “If you swallow it, you’re gonna choke!” I was like, “Okay…” and then she was gone.

JIM HAROLD: Wow. So she had passed, but she came back to tell you, “Don’t put that in your mouth, you’ll choke.”

BECKY: Yep. Because I had it full in my mouth. I was going to town on this stupid necklace. [laughs] She would come to me every once in a while. Usually just her voice. I didn’t see her again.

I was 10 – we had moved to town again, to the same place, and a couple houses down there was a canal next to where we lived, and I was playing with my dolls and I heard, “Becky!” I run out to my mom and I’m like, “What?” She’s like, “I didn’t call your name.” I was like, “Okay.” I went back and sat down to play with my dolls and I heard, “Go to the canal.” I was like, “Okay.” So I got dressed and I walked down to the canal, and there were two kids trying to catch ducks. I was like, “Oh, yay, friends!” I was so excited because I’d never seen these kids before. The little girl was like, “Can you help us catch our grandmother’s ducks?” I’m like, “Okay.”

I wasn’t allowed to be at the canal during this time because they had opened up the dam, so there was a ton of water flowing through the canal. If my mother had seen me there, I would’ve gotten in a lot of trouble. So I was like, “I’ll just stick to the sides. You guys try to catch the ducks, I’ll just watch.” The little girl had pushed the ducks up against the shore, so she’s like, “Come down, help me.” I went down and I’m trying to grab the mother duck, and we still couldn’t get them. I was like, “Whatever, I’m going to walk back up to the top of the canal.”

I looked around and I couldn’t see her little brother. He was probably about four years old. I was like, “Oh no. I don’t see your brother.” She started screaming and running around. I’d always been taught if you’re having trouble, kneel down and pray. So I knelt down and I prayed, and the answer came so fast. “Go down to the end, to the catwalks. Sit by the shore and kick as hard as you can.” So I ran down there, I got down next to the water, and I started kicking in that water as hard as I could, and I kicked something. So I kicked harder and I kicked harder, and his body floated to the surface.

I grabbed him out, I drug him to the top, I started pounding on his back. All this water came out. He took a deep breath and he was all, “Thank you.” [laughs] I was like, oh my gosh.

JIM HAROLD: “I just saved your life. A little more than a ‘thank you.’”

BECKY: His sister came, and he told us that he had caught a duckling and flipped into the water, and the flow of the water had sucked him down against the pipe. And there was a grating over the pipe, so he was stuck against it. He couldn’t get out. I was so thankful that – I knew it was my great-grandmother because it was her voice. I knew it was her that told me to do that. It was a very awesome experience. But I did not tell my mother why I was sopping wet when I got home because I knew I was going to get in trouble. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: So through your life, she’s served as kind of a guardian angel, but just as much to help other people as help you.

BECKY: Exactly. And growing up in my religion, we were always taught that we’re the angels. We have our relatives all around us, helping us, but we’re the angels that are supposed to go and do the things that are supposed to be done. We’ll have those voices telling us to go, and you just are supposed to listen and go. That’s always what I had been taught, so I listened.

JIM HAROLD: That is so cool. I just love that. A lot of times when people talk about spooky-ooky, it’s one of those things that it’s just negative. But sometimes it can be positive. But that is not the end; there’s more, right?

BECKY: Oh yes. She’s come to me tons of times, but I’ll tell you a couple of the most profound ones. I moved to LA after I met my husband, and we had a little townhome in the Valley near LA. I had just had a baby; she was three months old at the time, and I had postpartum really bad. They had begged me to leave the house, because I wouldn’t leave the house. They’re like, “Come on, you’re going to love this movie.” It was 13 Going on 30. I remember it distinctly.

So I went. I had a great time with my friends. I’m like, “All I needed to do was get out of the house. I feel so much better.” I drive home, and as I’m passing our townhouse, there’s a man out front, and he has this huge backpack on his back. I just got the icky feeling, like “Don’t go in that apartment. Don’t go.” So I went around the corner and I parked the car, and I sat and watched the clock for 10 minutes. I’m looking and he still hasn’t walked by. There was a house next door, so I thought maybe he was from the house. I was like, “It should be fine now. It’s been 10 minutes.”

I walk over there, and there he was. He was all, “I was wondering when you were going to come back.” I just froze. I looked at him and I froze. I couldn’t move. He came up and he grabbed my wrists. I had been trained in self-defense, so I’m like, “I’m going to lay this guy out. I’ll be fine.” No. I was like lightning. Every time I’d deflect his grasp, he would grab me again. I’d go to bite him, he would deflect me again. I tried to scream, he put his hand over my mouth. I was picking, I was scratching, I was trying everything to get away from him.

JIM HAROLD: Oh my goodness.

BECKY: I heard my great-grandmother’s voice, and she’s all, “Let me tell you what to do.” I calm down and I stop struggling, and she told me, “Tell him that you have a friend that loves men with dark hair and brown eyes, and she loves men that are super dedicated. And this guy seems dedicated because he’s looking for a wife.” Because that whole time as he was struggling with me, he was telling me that he was going to take me away and marry me and have children with me. I was like, “This guy is bananas. This guy’s not right in the head.” [laughs]

I kept telling him, “No, I’m married. I have a baby.” He was all, “You don’t have a wedding ring on.” I’m like, “Because I just had a baby. It doesn’t fit.” He kept saying I was lying. So when she came to me with this, I’m like, “There’s no way this is going to work.” She said, “Just tell him that she works for the homeless and takes care of people and she’d love to take care of him.” I was like, “Okay.” I’m like, “Hey…” and I tell him everything that she’s told me. “She’d be so dedicated to you. She loves men like you.” He’s like, “Oh,” and he let go of me. I was like, “Oh man, this is working. I don’t know how this is working, but it’s working.”

I’m like, “Hold on a second. Let me get your phone number and your name.” He’s like, “Okay, my name is Jacob and here’s my phone number.” I wrote it down. He’s like, “Let me walk you up to your apartment.” I’m like, “Okay.” He walked me up to the gate, and I was shaking so bad I couldn’t get my key into the lock, so I had to use the callbox. I call my husband and I’m like, “Hey, can you open the gate? I’m locked out.” I’m trying to be super calm so I don’t make the man know that I was lying. The gate finally opens and I don’t even look back at him; I just shut the gate, and then I’m like, “I’m good!” He’s like, “Okay, don’t forget to call your friend!” I’m like, “I will!”

I ran back to my apartment, got in and locked the door, and I told my husband what had happened. He’s like, “That didn’t happen.” I showed him the phone number with the guy’s name and he’s like, “You need to call the police.” I’m like, “No, because then I’m going to have to see him again,” which was stupid, I know. But I was just so scared. I did not want to see that man again.

JIM HAROLD: Would’ve been good to call them, but I understand where you’re coming from. That had to be a very frightening situation. But there’s one more you were going to tell us that has to do with a major big box home improvement store.

BECKY: Yes. I was working on a movie with my husband. It was a low-budget movie. The carpenter and I needed to go pick up some pieces for piping that we were running through the scene. I had been depressed at the time because a lot of things were going wrong, and I was like, “I haven’t heard Great-Grandmother” – because she was always there, and then I hadn’t heard her in years. I’m like, “Is there really a purpose for me anymore?” Because usually I always felt like because she was there, there were things I needed to do. Even though I was working on this amazing project, I still had that feeling. So we’re in Home Depot – sorry, I don’t know if I can say it.

JIM HAROLD: You can say it.

BECKY: We’re in Home Depot and we’re trying to find these connecting pieces for the pipes. I ask one of the workers there, “Hey, where are these pieces?” He’s like, “They’re up on the top of the shelving unit.” I’m like, “Okay, can you get them down for us? We need about 20 pieces.” He’s like, “Sure.” I walk up next to the ladder and he’s getting the stuff, and there was this big box teetering on the edge, and all of a sudden I hear, “Stand still.” I’m looking up and I’m like, “Okay.”

These huge shelving pieces, the braces, start falling from the sky, and they fall in a perfect circle around me. The guy comes screaming down like, “Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, are you okay?” I’m just shaking, but not a single piece hit me. They were everywhere. It was like a perfect circle around me. At that point I’m like, “You know what? I have a purpose. Great-Grandmother’s still here. She still loves me.” I have never doubted it since. It was amazing. So those are the big stories.

JIM HAROLD: Very, very cool indeed. The fact that she saved you so many times and helped save others, I think that’s awesome. Hauntings don’t always have to be spooky. Sometimes they can be very, very powerful and very sweet. Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your story.

BECKY: Thank you, Jim. Stay spooky!

JIM HAROLD: Stay spooky!

As you know, lately we’ve been spending some time with some other fellow paranormal podcasters and having them share their stories. It’s been a lot of fun. I’ve really, really enjoyed it. Today we have Kevin from We Need To Talk About Ghosts, from the UK. He was very nice to have me on his show, and very much appreciate that. He’s going to tell us – and he told me a little bit about it – a remarkable story that he gleaned, and he’s going to share what happened. Absolutely chilling, Kev. Thank you for joining us and tell us this story.

KEVIN: Thank you very much, Jim. Firstly, it’s a pleasure to be on here, as I said. This story is one that I’m just in because I asked the individual about certain ghost stories. A place that I used to work many years ago. Because I’m into the paranormal, as yourself, we’ve got a paranormal podcast – I ask anybody that I meet, “Do you have a paranormal story? Do you believe in ghosts? Have you got anything you would like to tell?”

This one girl who was a really good friend of mine called Belinda says, “No, nothing of interest.” A couple of weeks later, she comes in to work and she says, “You’ll never believe it. Our Celine” – who’s her little sister; she’s about six years of age – she says, “She started to say that she’s got an invisible friend, and this invisible friend goes by the name of Zazabe.” I was like, “That’s a weird name. It’s not like Clive or Keith or anything. It’s quite specific.”

JIM: [laughs] Martin.

KEVIN: Exactly. It’s just a bit weird. She says, for example, her mum heard her laughing and joking with someone in a room. She went in; it’s just the daughter Celine there. She says, “Who are you talking to?” She said, “Zazabe.” So she left them alone.

Then things start going missing around the house, like the remote control and keys and things like this, and it’s always when it’s only Celine in the room that things have gone missing, so she’s culprit number one. They say, “Where’s the keys?” Celine says, “Zazabe took them.” They’re like, “Don’t be daft. You’ve moved them. Where’s the keys?” This goes on. She keeps saying, “It’s not me, it’s Zazabe.” In Belinda’s words, she gets a little bit naughtier. For example, things start falling over in the kitchen, like a chair’s been pulled onto the floor, and the mother will run in and ask her what she’s doing, and she’ll start crying and say, “It’s not me it’s Zazabe.” They obviously shrug it all off.

So Belinda’s telling me this at work; a couple of weeks go past, she comes in and says, “It’s getting a little bit weird now.” I said, “Why?” She said, “Me dad is a long distance driver, and his truck keys went missing from the kitchen unit. Celine was the only one who was in the room at the time. He’s really getting upset with her, saying, ‘Where are the keys, where are the keys?’ Celine is saying, ‘Zazabe’s taken them.’” Belinda says to me, “Anyway, we find them above the oven. There’s no possible way that Celine could get up there without using a stepladder, which she doesn’t have access to, obviously.

Above this oven also were things like the remote. Everything that had gone missing was on top of this place that this poor six-year-old had no way of getting up to.

Anyway, she starts then saying to the mother – the little girl does – “Zazabe wants to play outside. Can we go and play in the street?” The mother’s like, “No. You can play in the back garden, and that’s where you’re playing,” because it was a very busy main road. “But he wants to play in the street, he wants to play in the street.” “No, you play in the back and that’s all you play.”

Anyway, I think Belinda goes to work somewhere else within the same building, and next time I see her, I say, “Oh, what’s going on with Zazabe?” She says, “We’ve moved house and Celine’s fine. There’s no issues.” And that was that. That was the end of the story.

Then about five months later, Belinda comes marching up to my desk at work and throws down – in the UK we’ve got these – I call them, sexist or not, “women’s magazines.” One’s called Women’s Own. There’s another one called Chat.

JIM HAROLD: Right, there’s comparable – geared towards women, yeah.

KEVIN: Aimed towards females. So she comes in and she whacks one of these gossip magazines down and turns it to a page which is entitled, “A Ghost Nearly Killed My Child.” She goes, “Read that story.” When you read the story, this woman from down south, about 200 miles away, says that her six-year-old daughter, out of nowhere, started talking to an invisible friend by the name of Zazabe. Zazabe demanded to play outside, so the woman allowed the daughter to play outside with her invisible friend, and the woman watched in disbelief as the ball the daughter was playing with floated in midair and threw itself into the middle of the street. The daughter than ran out to try and get the ball, and only by the grace of God was her dad going past and managed to scoop her out of the way of an oncoming car.

JIM HAROLD: Wow.

KEVIN: For me, it blew me mind. To this day, I think, what are the odds of 200 miles away, two children coming up with a name so bizarre as “Zazabe”? It’s not a name that – as we spoke about earlier, it’s not a name like Keith or Martin or Clive or a name you just make up. It’s a very specific name. Ever since, any time – for example, when the Zozo phenomenon came out, it was a bit like, I wonder if that’s anything to do with this Zazabe.

JIM HAROLD: It’s interesting. That kind of verification, that’s very, very wild. And I’m one, Kev, who believes – I’ve said this on the shows before, and I know you mentioned you listen and have listened in the past – I don’t believe everything’s a demon. However, I do believe that at times, there are more sinister energies, and they can prey upon us. That doesn’t mean every time there’s a haunting, it’s a demon, or there’s a demon between every doorstep or around every corner. You asked me on your show, did I believe in possession. I gave it a 9 out of 10 for yes. I think it’s relatively rare, but I think it’s possible. And it sounds like that’s kind of what your friend’s sister was – she may not have been possessed, but maybe a darker spirit was trying to harm her in some way.

KEVIN: Yeah, definitely. And when these darker spirits seem to have their own personality is when it really starts to get freaky. Is Zazabe a sort of demon or creature that focuses solely on young children, for example? That’s where my mind goes, and that’s where my mind then starts to freak out.

JIM HAROLD: I can tell you one thing: I hope they don’t pick on middle-aged podcasters. [laughs]

KEVIN: [laughs] You and me both, mate. You and me both.

JIM HAROLD: Speaking of which, Kev, you are an accomplished podcaster in your own right. Tell people a little bit about your show and where they can find it.

KEVIN: Okay. Thank you, Jim. We run two podcasts. We’ve got We Need To Talk About Ghosts, which has been going about five years. We’ve just had yourself on, very graciously. That is me, as you can hear me now – that’s me speaking as Kev Eustace, talking tongue-in-cheek about certain things, but being quite serious when need be. The other show is called The Dark Paranormal, and that is much more serious and less tongue-in-cheek and more drama-driven. Both are aspects of my personality; it depends what mood the listener is in in terms of which one they listen to.

JIM HAROLD: I hope they check out both. Kev, thank you for having me on the programs, and thank you for being a part of the Campfire tonight.

KEVIN: Thank you so much. It’s been an honor, Jim. Thank you.

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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: A return caller is on the line. Jamie is back from Oklahoma. You may remember a while back she was on and told that incredible story about her grandfather potentially having an alien abduction experience, and maybe it extended to her as well. She’s back to tell us another kind of story, this one about an apparition. Jamie, welcome back to the show, and please tell us what happened.

JAMIE: Jim, thank you so much for letting me come back and tell you another story. This one’s pretty short. It happened to me, actually, this time, about eight years ago. It’s a tiny bit of setup. My mother’s parents and her husband’s parents were downsizing, so she came to be in possession of a whole bunch of old family photos and trinkets and heirlooms and items. She wasn’t sure what to do with this. She ended up setting up a wall in her house, which she calls “The Wall of Dead People,” which is all these old photos, going back to the 1800s, of their family members.

When she did this, within a couple of weeks, she told me that she started seeing a spirit in her house. She didn’t feel uncomfortable, and she was sure it was this great-great-great-grandmother, was the sense she got. I love my mom to death – she is prone to flights of fancy, so I didn’t really take it that seriously. I was like, “Oh okay, sure, Mom. That’s nice.” This is the home I grew up in. Never saw anything there. I was like, “Okay, sure.”

But then I am preparing for my wedding, and my mom has a wonderful kitchen, so I’m standing in her kitchen and cooking cupcakes for my wedding the next day because I DIY too much. But I’m baking all these cupcakes, and from her kitchen you can see the Wall of Dead People right in front of it, and then you can see the hallway going to the bedrooms.

I am standing at the stove, I don’t remember, putting in or taking out cupcakes, and all of a sudden there is a woman standing at the end of the hallway, just staring at me. And it is so clichéd ghost-looking that I just stopped. She is in old-timey dress, she is semi-translucent, very gray. I will say I was terrified, but she was right; I didn’t feel threatened. I froze. She just stared at me for a while, turned, drifted down the hallway and into my mom’s room. And I just stood there frozen for a good 30 minutes, waiting for her to come back. I never saw it again.

JIM HAROLD: Wow. So from then on, if you heard something from Mom, you weren’t so apt to reject it out of hand.

JAMIE: Yeah, exactly. I didn’t dismiss it. I felt a little bad for being like, “Oh yeah, sure, Mom.” [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: That’s a great story. Jamie, thank you so much for joining us and being a part of the Campfire, and stay spooky.

JAMIE: Thank you so much.

JIM HAROLD: Charinay is on the line from Texas, and she’s been listening for a few years now. We appreciate it. She’s going to tell us about – well, I’m not going to say what it is because it’ll kind of spoil it. Let’s say this: it is remarkable. You want to stay tuned for this one. Charinay, welcome to the show and tell us what happened.

CHARINAY: No problem, thank you. In 2018, me and my husband were on a cruise. Summertime, kids out of school. We booked an ATV tour to a haunted hacienda in the Yucatan.

JIM HAROLD: Cool.

CHARINAY: When I was booking it, I didn’t realize that it was haunted. I didn’t realize it until we got there, but we like spooky stuff, so hey. The hacienda was gorgeous, by the way. I want to say it dated back to maybe 100 years, but right now, present day, it’s in ruins. The small town that surrounded the hacienda is a ghost town now, and the tour director was saying all the crazy things that were going on. I don’t remember exactly what he said; I just remember it was haunted.

So we drive up there, we’re walking around, we’re taking pictures. Nothing weird is happening. It was just me and my husband on this tour. The tour guide was telling us how he was a skeptic, but there were other people on the tour who had experienced scratches, being pushed/pulled, whatever. We’re like, “Okay.” We’re walking around, and there’s this room – I don’t remember if it was a small chapel or a playroom. I really don’t remember, but I do remember there were signs and sigils and pentagrams painted onto the wall. The guide was saying that present day, people will come, will sneak in, and they will do rituals. What kind of rituals? He didn’t know. But he knew he would see fire – not fire, but he could tell people made a fire and there were candles and everything.

I was walking towards it and I was taking pictures, and I was trying to walk in it, like a dummy, trying to walk through the door, and I was held back. I wasn’t pushed back, but it was almost like an invisible barrier, like, “No, no, no! Don’t come in here.” And I listened. I turned and told my husband, “Uh, something’s not letting me in this room.” He’s like, “Well, time to go.” The guide looked at us, and he shook his head. I could tell he wasn’t really believing me, but anyway.

Fast forward, we get home. We have four children, and my sister-in-law graciously, with her two kids, they stayed in the house with my kids. She slept in our bedroom. When she was leaving, we were asking her how everything was going, and she goes, “Everything was fine.” She pulled me to the side and she goes, “One night, I was lying in bed trying to go to sleep, and I heard a male voice saying, ‘Who are you?’” I was like, “What?” She was like, “Yeah, maybe I was dreaming.” But further down the line, we did realize that the day that I went to the hacienda was the same night that’s she heard the voice. So just keep that in mind.

A couple of weeks later, my husband’s going fishing with his friends. We live in Houston, so we’re close to Galveston. He and his buddies like to wake up at three in the morning and they like to be there before the sun gets up.

JIM HAROLD: Sure, that’s one of the best times to fish.

CHARINAY: Yes. I heard him get out of bed, he got dressed, rummaging around. A few minutes later, he’s out the door. I’m like, okay. I try to roll over and go back to sleep. I felt someone – you know how sometimes you can just feel when someone walks into the room? And he got in the bed. I said, “Oh, maybe his friends cancelled.” I tried to roll over to ask him, “What happened, did someone cancel?” I could not move.

Now, that didn’t freak me out at first because I’m used to sleep paralysis. It’s been happening to me since I was 15. I don’t see anything. Every now and then I’ll hear voices, but that’s pretty much it. But this time, when I tried to roll over, I heard a laugh. This deep, guttural laugh that shook the bed. The whole bed was just shaking. I was like, oh my God. I tried to reach over to my little bedside table, and I kid you not, my hand went through the table.

JIM HAROLD: Oh man.

CHARINAY: At that point, I didn’t register it because I was so afraid. I could not open my eyes, I couldn’t scream, I couldn’t cry. I just heard this thing laughing, and the bed was vibrating. Now, since all of this has happened, I’ve learned that – I always knew that I was a sensitive, but I didn’t know exactly what that meant. Now I know. I know that I’m clairsentient. That means that I can feel, and that’s my strongest – I can walk into a room and I can tell you if there’s a spirit in that room and it’s time to go. I’m clairvoyant and clairaudient.

Being clairvoyant, I see things in my mind’s eye. I just write it off like, “Oh, that’s just my imagination.” No. I saw him. He was a solid figure. It was not a shadow. It was a solid figure. He was completely bald. He had pointy ears and he had razor-sharp teeth. It looked like it was 500 teeth in his mouth.

JIM HAROLD: Yikes.

CHARINAY: He had the biggest grin, and the grin allowed me to see all these razor-sharp teeth.

JIM HAROLD: Oh my gosh.

CHARINAY: I’m seeing this, I feel like my body is floating, I’m reaching for something, my hands are going through the furniture – it’s insane. After about 15 minutes of this, which felt like forever, he’s gone. I’m sitting in bed, I’m drenched in sweat, in teras. I couldn’t scream, I couldn’t do anything but just cry. I’m sitting in the bed and I’m like, “Oh my God,” I’m trying to calm down. You know when something happens to you like that, you try to write it off. Even though I know it happened, I’m like, “It was a nightmare. It was a dream. It’s okay.”

I tried to lie back down, and I would feel from my feet, going up, sleep paralysis. I would jump back up and I would turn the TV on. I tried to do whatever I could to calm down. It did not work. I stayed up the rest of the morning, all the way until my husband came home. Maybe he came home about 5 p.m., and I told him everything. He’s a sensitive too, and he believed me 100%. He was like, “Okay, I believe you,” whatever.

Couple of days later, I learned that he called his mother over because he realized that I was depressed. I went through this state of depression, and I was afraid. I was afraid to go to sleep. His mother is Mexican and she is very attuned to her Indigenous roots. She rushed right over. She came with holy basil, holy water, and sage. She looked serious when she walked in the house. She’s looking around and she looks at me and she hugs me, and I watched her do this whole ritual. She was praying over the basil, the sage, and this whole big thing.

The whole family was there, and she goes, “Look, we’re going to walk through this house and you’re going to say the Lord’s Prayer with me.” I’m like, “Okay, okay!” We’re walking through the house and she dips the holy basil into the water, she’s spraying it around the house, she’s blowing the sage. I cannot pray. The words will not come out of my mouth. I would open my mouth; they would not come out. My husband looked and he was like, “What’s wrong?” I told him, “I’m gong to pass out. I can’t do this.” I felt weak. My knees were buckling.

They called my kids down. They came down to help me. My mother-in-law was like, “Put your hands on her. Pray. We’re going to walk around the house. It’s going to be fine.” That helped to some avail. I was able to start praying. We get to my room, where the heaviest energy was, and I couldn’t stand anymore. I plopped on the bed. I couldn’t say the words, and I was so nauseous. I said, “I’m going to throw up in front of everybody. Throw up and pass out.” She’s even crawling under my bed, blowing sage everywhere. Her husband is there and everybody’s into it, and I just feel like I’m going to pass out.

When everything was over, I felt that it was gone. I felt fine. A couple of days later, my sister-in-law called to tell me, “Do you remember the laughing?” I said, “What do you mean, the laughing?” She goes, “When you were on the bed, we heard laughing coming from your bathroom. It was a male voice, and it was like he was mocking us. He was laughing.” I said, “No, I didn’t hear anything.” She goes, “Okay.” A couple of days later, she had a priest come. He didn’t know what was going on, but he just blessed the house. Everything felt fine. She told me every night I should read Psalm 91, which I did, and that really, really helped me get over my fear.

Another quick little thing – this is amazing. I was in bed and I felt someone standing next to my bed. I can see things in my eye, and this energy was so strong, I’m like, “What the heck?” I turned my head – I couldn’t open my eyes – and there beside my bed was Archangel Michael. He was standing next to my bed, and I knew it was him because he resembled the paintings. He had blonde hair, blonde bangs. He was decked out in gold armor from head to toe. He had a sword, he had a shield, and he was staring in a corner of my room where I could feel something watching me. He was just staring at this corner, just ready. He had his sword up, and he looked down at me and he did a little nod, like, “Everything’s okay,” and I blacked out.

I went to sleep and I’ve never seen him again, but he visited me in my dream. That’s a whole other story, but that’s pretty much my story. Ever since I went through that ordeal – when I tell you I’m not afraid of anything, nothing. I can’t watch scary movies – that doesn’t scare me.

JIM HAROLD: You have a monster in your bed, essentially, as you said in your email to me, and that will change your perspective. And that monster, the one with the teeth and the bald head – how long do you think you saw it? How long was it there?

CHARINAY: I believe about 10 to 15 minutes.

JIM HAROLD: Wow. Oh my gosh.

CHARINAY: It was a long time. It could be two minutes and you feel like it’s forever. I felt like this was going on for hours. I don’t see how I didn’t have a heart attack. I was terrified.

JIM HAROLD: You’re braver than I am.

CHARINAY: I’m brave now. That really broke me out of – it changed my life. I think for the better, because when that happened, my senses started awakening. Now I see spirit – and none of it frightens me whatsoever.

JIM HAROLD: Good for you. I’ve got to tell you, you’re braver than me. Thank you so much for being a part of the Campfire. I appreciate it, and thank you for being on the show.

CHARINAY: Thank you so much.

JIM HAROLD: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. You know, when you’re at your best, you can do great things. I know that’s true for me. But sometimes life gets you bogged down and you might feel overwhelmed, like you’re not showing up in quite the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help get you closer to the best version of you because when you feel empowered, when you have someone to talk to, you’re more prepared to take on everything that life might throw at you.

That’s why I think if you find yourself in this position, and you feel that you may need a therapist, why don’t you reach out to BetterHelp? There’s so much that therapy can do for you. You an learn positive coping skills, how to set boundaries. It empowers you to be the best version of yourself. And it isn’t just for people who have experienced major trauma. So again, if you’re thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It is convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. I love the idea of the convenience of it, and you can just do something simply online.

All you have to do to get started is fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. It’s one of those things where we mesh differently with different people. Maybe you have one therapist and it doesn’t quite click, but you can easily change. No muss, no fuss. I think it’s great.

So, if you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com/jimharold today to get 10% off your first month. That’s betterhelp.com/jimharold. That’s betterhelp.com/jimharold. And we thank BetterHelp for their support of Jim Harold’s Campfire.

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

JIM HAROLD: Morgan is on the line from Louisville, Kentucky. We’re so glad to have her with us. If I remember correctly, the birthplace of Muhammad Ali and, of course, the Louisville Slugger.

MORGAN: Yes.

JIM HAROLD: We’re so glad to have Morgan with us. And actually, I wanted to give a big shoutout to her friend and coworker Kelly, who told Morgan about the Campfire. So thank you, Kelly. Now, Morgan is going to tell us about a ghostly encounter she had when she was a theater major. Morgan, please take it away. You are in the spotlight, so to speak.

MORGAN: Thank you, Jim. Also, thank you for pronouncing the city name correctly. [laughs] A lot of people mispronounce it.

This happened when I was a senior theater major here at one of the universities here in the state. I won’t say which one just because I don’t know if they would appreciate this type of publicity or not. But it was one of the state universities that is known for its theater program, and this actually happened during a performance. It was the Sunday matinee, and the play was “Pygmalion.” In case anybody doesn’t know that play, it takes place in the early 1900s, so we were all dressed in early 1900s garb. If you’ve ever seen Titanic, it was clothing like that. All the men are in suits and ties and hats and all the women are in the long dresses with the updos and all that jazz.

I was standing backstage. I was getting ready and waiting for my cue to enter into the scene, and everybody else in the cast was already onstage. I was the only one left that had yet to enter. In case you’ve never been a theater major or been backstage in a show, there’s a backstage area. There’s two side backstage areas called the wings, and then there’s the part that’s straight back, that’s right behind the curtain.

I was standing in the back curtain part, just looking down, adjusting my dress, making sure I was looking okay to go on, and all of a sudden I looked up and in the doorway leading out to the hallway, directly across from me, I see what looked like a semi-transparent man dressed in early 1900s clothing, standing there, leaning up against the doorway sideways, facing away from me into the hallway, just standing there smoking one of those curly Sherlock Holmes style pipes. You know the ones I’m talking about, that have the curl on the end.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, exactly.

MORGAN: It was one of those. He looked like he was just leaning up against the door, just chilling out like he owned the place. At first I was like, “Am I really seeing what I think I’m seeing?” At first I thought it was one of my castmates trying to play a prank on me because he was dressed in the same type of clothes that our costumes were. But the more I looked at him, I was like, “No, we don’t have one of those trench coats as part of our show,” because he was wearing a tan trench coat and a bowler hat. He had one of those handlebar moustaches.

JIM HAROLD: Let me ask you, is the theater very old?

MORGAN: I don’t know. I have tried to look up the history of the building to see if I can find any information about how old it is or what, but I’ve come up empty-handed. I couldn’t really make out any facial features at the time other than the handlebar moustache and the fact that he had dark hair and was wearing a bowler hat. But then the part that really got me was that he turned and looked at me, and then he tipped his hat to me, the way that a gentleman in that period would do to a lady, as if to say, “Oh, sorry, miss, didn’t know you were standing there, my bad,” and then he just slowly walked away.

But the weird thing was as he started to walk away, the door that he was leaning up against slowly closed and very quietly shut. And this was something that nobody was ever able to do, no matter how hard they tried, because this was a big, heavy metal door. It would clang.

JIM HAROLD: Like a fire door, it sounds like.

MORGAN: Yeah, like a fire door. It would clang shut. No matter how strong you were, even if you were going super slow with it, trying not to make a noise, it would make a noise. And it did not make a sound. But yeah, I saw him from the hip up, so I didn’t see his feet or anything. I just saw from the hip up, and like I said, he was semi-transparent, dressed the way that we were, and he seemed to realize that I was there. Who that could be, I don’t know. Like I said, I’ve tried to look up the history of the building to see if I could find any information, what the land used to be used for, what the building used to be used for. But I’ve not been able to find anything. It is a total mystery to me who that could’ve been and why he picked that moment to show up.

If I have time, I have another spooky one that happened in the same building.

JIM HAROLD: Go ahead.

MORGAN: The other time that I experienced something spooky was my freshman year. We were all required to work on one show a semester, so if we weren’t in it, we had to work on scene crew or costume crew or something like that. On this show, I was on the costume crew. We were putting things away after the final performance of one of the shows. It was a small cast, so there was only me and one other girl that were putting the costumes away. Even though it was a small cast, it was a long show, so by the time the show got out it was a little bit after 10 o’clock at night.

We decide to split the work up. She decided that she would take those items that needed to be washed, like all the undergarments and things that went up against the body, to be washed, and I would take the outerwear, like the coats and the belts and the shoes and everything, into the stockroom to start putting them away. I went up to our stockroom – and this is important: the stockroom only had one door. There was only one way in or out of this room. And like I said, it was super late, so we were the only two that were there at the time. She was all the way at the other end of the hall, so I was the only one in there. I was completely alone, or so I thought.

I was standing on one of those stepladders that’s got two or three steps on it, and I was standing up there trying to figure out which bin I needed to put one of the belts back into, and all of a sudden over my left shoulder, I heard as clear as day what sounded like a catcall type of whistle. I personally can’t whistle or else I would try to replicate it for you, but it’s like that stereotypical whistle when a guy is trying to catcall a girl that he thinks is cute and is trying to get her attention. It was like that.

I just froze for a second, and then immediately after, I felt what felt like a hand grab my arm. But I looked down and there was nothing there, and I turned around and there was nothing there. I just said, “Nope!” [laughs] I jumped off the stepladder. I was like, “Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope!”

JIM HAROLD: I don’t blame you.

MORGAN: “I’m getting out of here!” So I jumped down, I grabbed my stuff, I turned the lights off, I locked the door behind me, and then I ran down the hallway to tell the other girl what had happened. We both decided to abandon ship for the night and go back to our dorms and reconvene in the morning and do it together, because neither one of us wanted to be alone in that building after that.

JIM HAROLD: Wow. Wow, wow, wow. Oh my goodness, what a story, really. I thank you so much for sharing it. I really appreciate it, both of the stories. Seems like there are certainly hauntings going around.

MORGAN: Oh yeah, I am not the only person that has experienced weird things in that building. I would venture to say that almost everybody I know that graduated from that theater program had at least one experience that they can remember of being spooked in some way. So it’s definitely a known thing among students there that that building is haunted.

JIM HAROLD: There you have it. Thanks again. I appreciate it, and stay spooky.

MORGAN: Thank you so much. Stay spooky, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: Next up on the line is Ocean from Utah. She has a great name. Ocean. I think that is an awesome name. She’s going to tell us about her mom, who played around with a Ouija board, and that’s where everything starts. Ocean, welcome to the show, thank you for joining us, and tell us what happened.

OCEAN: Hi, Jim. Thanks for having me. Back in the ’80s, when my mom was a teenager, she got into a lot of trouble. She was really rebellious. My grandparents were super religious Jehovah’s Witnesses. She decided she was going to do the exact opposite of that and go and play with a Ouija board. She hung out with some people that didn’t really practice the best practices when it comes to witchcraft. I don’t want to say specifically.

One night, she wasn’t feeling very good. She was at home at my grandparents’ house. She was lying on the couch in the living room, and she was lying there trying to feel better, and she told me that out of nowhere, she started hearing what sounded like wind was blowing. Out of nowhere, a black mass started to form in front of her. These are details that I had to re-verify recently because it had been so long since I heard her tell this story.

So a black mass started to form in front of her, and all of a sudden she wasn’t able to move. She was completely paralyzed. She wasn’t able to speak. She was barely able to breathe. She wasn’t really sure what was going on, and out of nowhere she started to be pushed down into the couch. She could feel the sides of the couch rising around her as the pressure was building and she was becoming more and more consumed.

In situations where you’re scared, she was told by my grandparents to speak the Lord’s name, which they believe is Jehovah. So after some struggling, she was finally able to whisper out, “Jehovah.” And within that same breath, the black mass disappeared, she was able to move again, she wasn’t paralyzed anymore. She was really scared, so she jumped up and was staring at the couch, like, “What the heck just happened?”, when the phone started ringing. Mind you, it’s the middle of the night, and again, my grandparents are very religious, so my grandpa was not happy. The phone’s ringing in the middle of the night and it’s a boy asking for my mom.

After some convincing, he finally let this boy talk to my mom. The voice on the other end was like, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know what to do.” She’s like, “What are you talking about? What is going on?” He said, “Me and some of the guys were playing on the Ouija board, and a demon started to attack one of us.” She didn’t really know what he was talking about, and then he was like, “I didn’t know what to do with it, so I banned it to your house.”

JIM HAROLD: Oh my.

OCEAN: Basically casting the demon away from the situation, and he sent it to my mom. She was like, “Are you kidding me? How could you do that? You know my parents are religious.” In that same moment, my grandparents had this laundry room door – still to this day, it’s the same door. It’s so funny. It’s a bifold wooden slat door, so it folds to open. As she’s on the phone talking to this kid, the door starts to open by itself, and she was like, “Oh my gosh, I think it’s here.”

This part of the story got a little hazy for me, but she was able to reaffirm for me that he did in fact stay on the phone with her, and he was like, “Go grab a Bible. Start reading out of the Bible and I’ll stay with you until you feel better.” As she started reading out of the Bible, she started to feel better, and then as she continued to read, the bifold door closed by itself. After some time of praying and reading out of the Bible, she felt better. I don’t know how much time had passed. She’s not really sure how long they were on the phone for. But he did stay with her until she felt better.

She told me she was able to get to sleep later that night. I don’t know how. [laughs] I wouldn’t be able to. That’s just one of the many stories that I grew up hearing from my mom because she was a little crazy.

JIM HAROLD: That is an interesting story, by all means. I have mixed feelings on the Ouija board. We do have one in our house because my wife had it when she was a teenager. We don’t play with it. I don’t use it, but it’s there. The analogy I’ve used – my thought process on it, and I could be wrong, is that it’s kind of like a spiritual chainsaw, in this way of thinking. This is the way I look at it. Okay, you see on TV and stuff, or maybe even in person, these people who take a chainsaw and they can make a beautiful ice sculpture or wooden sculpture and do all these great things with it. But if you give it to me and I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m just as likely to cut my arm off as cut a piece of wood. [laughs] I wonder if it’s like that maybe with the Ouija board. I just wonder.

OCEAN: I think so. I know people that have used Ouija board and they’ve never experienced anything negative out of it. But it’s because they’re able to protect themselves spiritually, and I think that unless you have that knowledge, there are certain things you really shouldn’t touch.

JIM HAROLD: There you go. Well, thank you so much, Ocean. I appreciate it, and stay spooky.

OCEAN: Stay spooky. Thanks, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: Happy New Year, everybody! And as we head into the winter, I’m sure you’ll need some audio entertainment. Now, of course, we have our free shows, but we also have our Paranormal Plus Club, and I would highly recommend that you check it out.

Basically, the Paranormal Plus Club is where you can go and get all of the archives going back to 2005. That includes a few hundred Campfires no longer on the free feeds. That includes several hundred editions of the Paranormal Podcast not on the free feeds. That includes hundreds of Plus shows that people don’t realize that we do each and every month. We do eight exclusive episodes for our Plus members. There are shows like UFO Encounters, Ghost Insight, The Cryptid Report, the list goes on. The Other Side. The thing is, people don’t know that we do all these extra shows. Even the members, I have to remind them from time to time. If you’re listening to this and you’re a member, make sure that you’re checking out those shows because those are part of your membership.

All told, it’s well over 2,000 episodes that you can’t get if you’re on the free feeds, so what are you waiting for? Go over to jimharoldplus.com and click on the banner with my face. It’ll take you to a page where it explains the Plus Club. There’s two different versions; there’s our classic Libsyn version where you have an app that you install on your device and you can listen on Apple devices, you can listen via Android devices, you can listen via Amazon device, you can listen via your computer. That’s for people who are like, “Hey, I want to be able to change from device to device, ecosystem to ecosystem. I want to be able to operate in any environment and listen to my Plus Club content.” And that’s great. They’ve been with us for years. They do a great job, and people love that Spooky Studio app.

This last year, we added another version, and it’s just as great. It’s like chocolate and vanilla, which one do you prefer. It’s the Apple Podcast version. If you tell me, “Jim, I’m not interested in a lot of different devices. I am an Apple device person and that’s all I want to listen on, and I listen in Apple Podcasts,” then I say the Apple Podcast version is for you. Now, with both systems you get a great deal. There are great discounts for the Libsyn version where you can get great discounts on monthly and yearly membership, and on Apple, they do something a little different. You can get a free trial, which is something Libsyn doesn’t do.

So each system has its own pluses. It’s just up to you to figure out which one you prefer. But the good news is, you get all those Campfires, you get all those Paranormal Podcasts on both versions, you get shows like UFO Encounters, Ghost Insight, The Other Side, The Cryptid Report – that Plus content, you get it on both systems. Get it today. Don’t delay. Go to jimharoldplus.com. That’s jimharoldplus.com. Make sure to click on the banner with my face on it at jimharoldplus.com. And thanks!

You’re listening to Jim Harold’s Campfire.

JIM HAROLD: One of the topics that really fascinates me is that of dreams. We’ve done various shows on the Paranormal Podcast and things about dreams over the years, but the thing is, it’s a situation where I believe that dreams sometimes can mean more than just mental garbage. They can actually signify something – and maybe they can actually serve as some kind of a premonition. Virginia is going to tell us about her very interesting dream. She’s calling in today from Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas. We’re so glad to have her on the show. Virginia, please tell us about this childhood dream.

VIRGINIA: Thanks for having me, Jim. In about 1991, I was like four and a half years old and we were living in the Denver area, and I had a terrible, scary nightmare that me and my parents were in this concrete cement building and we were walking around and there were folding tables with cardboard boxes of different kinds of fruit in them. We were milling around, and there was this dark hallway in the back with an owl’s head mounted, like how usually people have a deer head or something.

I was allowed to have freedom when we were at stores where I could wander off and come back as long as they could still mostly see me, so I went over to the hallway and I made hooting sounds to echo in the dark hallway, and someone put a ski mask over me and grabbed my mouth and grabbed me and kidnapped me.

JIM HAROLD: Oh my gosh, how terrifying.

VIRGINIA: Yeah, I woke up and I was really upset and crying. It felt different than a regular dream. It felt really, really real. I did what I always did when I had nightmares; I went in and I told my mom all about it, and she calmed me down and was like, “It’s just a dream. It’s okay.” I didn’t think anything of it until about two weeks later. We went to Grand Junction to visit my aunt, and I guess they’re known for their peaches there. On the way back home, we stopped at this cement building which had foldout tables with cardboard boxes of peaches in them, and we were going around looking, trying to pick some, and I saw this dark hallway in the back. It didn’t have an owl’s head over it, but it was still there.

I grabbed onto my dad’s leg and I sat on his foot and he had to walk limping with me dragging on him. I reminded my mom of the nightmare and I was like, “I’m so scared I’m going to get kidnapped.” My mom was like, “Uh, we’re going to get out of here right away.”

JIM HAROLD: Wow. That’s something, when a dream foretells what’s going to happen. That’s kind of wild. It makes you wonder about – I’m sure as a little kid you didn’t think about this, but as you get older, you think about, what does that say? How does the world work? How can I access this? How did I know this?

VIRGINIA: I think it was a guardian angel or something.

JIM HAROLD: It very well could’ve been. There’s been many cases of people having dreams and foreseeing something, and it helped them avoid a bad situation.

VIRGINIA: I have had two other dreams come true, but they were of happier things.

JIM HAROLD: Good. Do you have one you want to tell us? Maybe the one that resonated with you the most?

VIRGINIA: Yeah. When I was just about to start high school, I had this weird vivid dream where me and my parents were in a train car, and it had one type of wallpaper on it and behind us was another train car, and so on. The first train car had my brother and his wife and kid; the second train car behind us, so I guess the third, had my sister and her husband and kids in it, and then the last one had my last sister, but not her husband and not her kids in it. They each had different wallpaper.

About a year after that, my brother came and moved from Colorado to the Idaho area where we were, and then six months later my sister and her family moved up, and then about two years after that, my sister came but she wasn’t with her husband or kids because they had got divorced. But they all came to live with us for a short time while they were moving to the Idaho area.

JIM HAROLD: So that train was signifying each one of them coming in separate groups.

VIRGINIA: Yeah. I thought it was so weird my last sister didn’t come with her husband and kids, and I couldn’t understand until it happened, and then I was like, “Whoa, it makes sense now.”

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. That’s pretty wild. It’s one of those things where, again, you wonder how reality works where you have this. Do you think that maybe you’re more sensitive to this? I know you said it was a guardian angel, but do you think you’re maybe a little more tuned in to these kinds of things?

VIRGINIA: Maybe. I don’t know. I think everybody kind of has a little bit of it, but most people maybe try to ignore it.

JIM HAROLD: Good point. Very, very good point. Well, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it, Virginia, and I thank you for being a part of the Campfire today.

VIRGINIA: Thank you.

JIM HAROLD: Suzanne is on the line from Rhode Island. She has been a lifelong experiencer of the paranormal and UFO phenomena, and she’s going to tell a story today that starts with an extremely vivid dream. We’re so glad to have her with us. Suzanne, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us.

SUZANNE: Hi, Jim. Thank you so much for having me. I’ve really been looking forward to this. My situation is I have had a lifetime of precognitive dreams, and a few of them have stood out to me, but one in particular that happened in July of 2011, I have not been to shake.

What happened was I was living in Hollywood, California, at the time, and I had this extremely vivid dream where I was whisked to another place in another part of the world, and I just happened upon the scene of what looked like a bus accident, but there were no other cars involved. When I’m standing there looking at this bus, I realize that I’m standing next to five other people, and we’re all looking at each other like, “What are we doing here?” And we were all holding hands. We were just staring at each other, and then I got this really strong urge to run to the bus, and all the other people had the same feeling. We all looked at each other and we ran to the bus.

I knew I had to get into the bus, but it was on its side, so I just went right through the windshield, like I was a ghost, like I was transparent or something. When I went inside, there was all this screaming of women and children. Some of them were hanging from their seatbelts. I zoomed in on this one woman, and she was pleading with me – and what was really weird about it was she was pleading to me telepathically. She was looking at me really strongly, and she says, “Help my baby.”

JIM HAROLD: Oh my.

SUZANNE: I’m thinking, “Oh my gosh.” But when she was speaking to me telepathically, she was speaking to me in a foreign language, but I still understood what she was saying. I looked around and I looked underneath the seat, and I saw a baby underneath the seat with a gash on its cheek. I pulled the baby out, and when I pulled the baby out, I unhooked the seatbelt from the mom. The minute I freed her and realized that she didn’t have any other injuries, I looked around the rest of the bus and I saw that the other five people that were with me were all attending to other people like I was. I thought, “What is happening?”

I’m looking around to see if anybody else needed assistance, and when I realized that they didn’t, I for some reason got whisked right out of the bus as fast as I came in, and I was right back in my bed. I shot up into the sitting position and I thought, “Oh my gosh, what just happened?” I have no idea what happened. It was such a vivid dream. I couldn’t figure out if it was real, if I had had some sort of astral projection – which I have had experiences like that in my life, but this was different because other people were involved, and it was such a vivid scene.

I went about my day and I couldn’t really stop this feeling. I couldn’t shake this dream. I was just obsessed all day long. So I did all my errands, and when I came home, I just thought, “I need to google this.” I got on my computer and I googled – I think it was like “tour bus crash,” and the date was July 7th, 2011. Then I added “Europe” because I felt like the woman was speaking in a different language, so I felt like if it happened anywhere, it had to be over there somewhere. So I scrolled through three pages, and on the third page, there was a small thumbnail of a bus identical to the one that I saw in the dream on its side, and I thought, “What?”

I clicked on the thumbnail, opened up the article, and it was an article about a bus accident that had happened in Bulgaria involving a busload of mothers and their daughters traveling to a summer camp, but there were no other vehicles involved, just like what I had seen. It was like it just tipped over, fell into a ditch or something. But what was really strange about this was the accident happened at the exact time that I had been sleeping.

JIM HAROLD: Huh. So you may have tapped into that somehow.

SUZANNE: I don’t know. And I’m thinking – the only inconsistency as I was reading the rest of the article was that there was one fatality. I thought, “What?” I had this really strong feeling, like “How could I have missed that?” But when I read further, it said that the person who had died had been ejected, and I thought, “Oh my gosh, it’s because I didn’t see outside the bus. I missed that.” And then I felt really bad. I thought, what if I had been able to help this person if I had seen them being thrown from the bus?

I was just completely freaked out. I thought, did I remote view this? I started trying to make sense of it. I thought, was it like a time overlap or a parallel existence or something? And then I thought, you know, all the times that we hear about people that have car accidents where there’s like a guardian angel that shows up – I started thinking, what if we are the guardian angels that do this work while we’re sleeping?

JIM HAROLD: That’s an interesting thought. Now that I’d never thought of before.

SUZANNE: I hadn’t either. So yeah, and in retrospect, maybe I should’ve tried to contact somebody to see if they had seen anything strange. Like what if somebody had had a guardian angel situation happen during the accident? Now that would’ve been very interesting.

JIM HAROLD: Wow. So you think somehow you tapped into this, potentially. There may be some way that you had tapped into this event. And to be honest with you, it seems reasonable to me, for sure.

SUZANNE: I mean, what other explanation can there be? How could I have witnessed all this similarity, this coincidence, this synchronicity, this high strangeness? The only way I can think of it is either I remote viewed it and I ended up there with these other five people that are just like me – maybe we’re all “dialed in” or into the experience. Maybe I’ll see them again someday in another dream. I don’t know. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: I don’t know if you’ve thought about this, but the other piece of it is not only did you experience it and potentially astral traveled or something to this, but something made you find that documentation tying it back. So that was part of the story, too. It wasn’t just – you know what I’m saying? That was put someplace so you could see it and you could put two and two together on that.

SUZANNE: Right. So what does it mean, Jim? [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: I don’t know. That’s the tough part of doing this show because people will say, “Jim, don’t you have the answers? What should I do? My house is haunted.” I pretty much have to say, I don’t know. Somebody called in recently – it may be on this show, it may be on a previous show because we mix and match stories – someone called in with a haunted bed, which was a very creepy story, and I think I came to the conclusion – I said, “Again, I’m not an expert. All I can say is get a new bed and see if that helps.”

SUZANNE: Right. One of the reasons why I wanted to share this particular experience was maybe other of your listeners might have had a similar experience, and if so, maybe they can call in and share theirs.

JIM HAROLD: Good idea. We also have our Virtual Campfire Group over on Facebook you can find at virtualcampfiregroup.com. Maybe somebody will have some ideas over there. Suzanne, thank you so much for sharing a really great story, and I look forward to speaking with you again.

SUZANNE: Sounds great, Jim. Have a great day and stay spooky.

JIM HAROLD: Stay spooky!

We have a return caller. Maggie is on the line from Kentucky, and she has some odd coincidences – or are they coincidences? – she would like to share with us. Maggie, I love these kinds of stories because sometimes I think things are too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence. Tell us your stories.

MAGGIE: Thank you. I have three brief stories. Are they coincidences? I don’t know. One morning, when I was a kid, I woke up at our farm in complete terror for my dad. As soon as I woke up, I was full of fear for him, and I ran downstairs, and no one was in the house. Apparently everyone had gone out. There was a storm coming, and they had gone out to get the hay in. I stayed in the house, as I was supposed to do. I remember running from window to window, looking, watching, waiting for them to come back. It felt like something was prowling around the outside of the house. That’s what my apprhenesion felt like to me.

Sure enough, pretty soon my brothers and mother came in, carrying in my father. The rain had come and he had slipped on the wagon and hit his head against the wagon tongue. He’d missed the bolt that connects it to the tractor by like an inch, so he was very lucky. He was injured but lucky. So that’s the first story. Waking up with fear that was justified. And that never happened before.

The second one is nothing at all scary; it’s just a really odd coincidence. I went to college back in the early ’80s, where not only were the dorms segregated by gender, but the guys were on one side of the campus and the girls were on the other. There’s no internet, there’s no social media, no one knows where you are and no one cares where you are. I am at a party at a guy’s dorm on the other side of the campus from my room. Now remember, every dorm room has a landline. I am standing in this hall party, dorm room doors are open and people are talking, people are mingling, and I hear a phone a couple days away ring. It’s picked up, I keep talking, and someone’s like, “Yeah.” They say, “Maggie?”

I go to the phone and pick it up and I’m like, “Hello?” It’s my good friend Mary, who is crying. Something has happened to her. She’s just full of distress. She starts in with what’s happening to her and then she becomes aware of the noise in the background and she’s like, “What is all that noise?” I’m like, “I’m at a party.” She said, “Are you having a party without me?” I said, “No, I’m at a party. Mary, what number did you dial?” She said, “I dialed your dorm room.”

JIM HAROLD: Huh.

MAGGIE: I know, isn’t that odd? She dialed my dorm room a full quarter mile away, and it rang next to where I was standing on the other side of campus. Which I thought was very odd.

The third story – and this one is disturbing – I was a camp counselor in freshman year of college, and two other counselors and I had one night off between sessions. We had gone into town to have a nice supper, and we were going to the kind of camp where you pull in and there’s a protected place to camp, there’s a little booth there. I spent my whole freshman and sophomore years of college camping. I was a camp counselor both years. I camped all the time. I was unafraid of camping.

We pull up to this booth; the guy tells us how much it costs, and we can’t come up with it. We’re so poor. [laughs] So we decide we’re going to travel down the road and just pull off somewhere and sleep, which is what we did. The driver pulls off – I don’t know if it was a trailhead or a layby, but she turns off the car, her headlights are still on, and it was similar to that feeling I had when I woke up on the farm, like there was something just outside the car windows. I was alone in the backseat, and I reached out my arms and locked the back doors, and then I reached over the front seat and I locked their doors. I said, “We’ve got to get out of here right now.” She said, “What’s going on?” I said, “I don’t know, just let’s go. Let’s move.”

So she backed up and turned around and we drove back to the booth at the little camping place, and the guy’s like, “You’re back.” We’re like, “Yeah, we went about this far down the road and it didn’t feel right. We wanted to come back.” He’s like, “I’m really glad you came back. We had two young women murdered here a while back.”

JIM HAROLD: Oh my.

MAGGIE: Yeah. The other strange thing about that, Jim, is that I’m the nosiest person. I look things up online. Now granted, there wasn’t internet there, but I look things up online all the time. That was 41 years ago, and I never looked up anything about it until I thought about telling you about this. I looked up “1980s, camper murders, Pisgah National Forest,” and it came right up. So I don’t know. I don’t know if it was a part of what had happened to these young women. I don’t know if it was something that might have happened to us that night. I don’t know what it was. It was just right there with us, and I’m really glad that nice ranger let us in. And those are my three stories.

JIM HAROLD: I think coincidences sometimes happen for a reason. I just did a Paranormal Podcast on this not too long ago. I think it was the last one of 2022, about meaningful synchronicities and coincidences. It was with a very well-studied academic, graduated from Harvard Medical School, writes for Psychology Today, Dr. Bernard Beitman. He believes that there’s something more to many coincidences than just a coincidence. It’s an interesting listen, folks out there, if you get a chance to tune in to that. Maggie, thank you so much for joining us and for sharing these strange coincidences.

MAGGIE: Thank you, Jim. Have a great day.

JIM HAROLD: Well, thank you so much for tuning in to this edition of Jim Harold’s Campfire. So glad to have you listening. We hadn’t had some shoutout requests for a while, and then we got a slew of them in, so let’s go through it here. We’ve got three big shoutouts today.

First of all, Michelle said, “I was just wondering if you could give a shoutout to my son Aaron for his 18th birthday. His birthday is January 25th.” We got that in right before his birthday and stuff was edited, so it’s belated, but here’s a big birthday shoutout to Aaron, and stay spooky! And thank you, Michelle, for sending in your request.

Ashley from the UK sent me an email and said, “Hey Jim, I’ve listened to you for four years and I’m from the UK. Can you please give me a shoutout on your show?” And I say absolutely, so Ashley, a big shoutout to you and stay spooky!

And then finally, Stephanie says, “Hey Jim, I love your show and listen all the time. Just wondering if I can get a spooky shoutout for my 30th birthday on February 2nd. Keep up the amazing job.” This, too, is a belated birthday, so happy birthday, Stephanie, and stay spooky! And boy, I’m jealous; I wish I were 30 years old again. [laughs]

But again, to Aaron, to Ashley, to Stephanie, a big spooky shoutout to y’all and stay spooky. And if you want to get your own video spooky shoutout, your own personalized video for yourself or your loved one, there’s an easy way to do that. Go over to cameo.com/thejimharold. That’s cameo.com/thejimharold, and I will be glad to do a personalized video for you or yours.

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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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