A walking dead man, a young girl is led to money by a mysterious figure, TWO weird green entities and much more on this edition of Jim Harold’s Campfire!

-TRANSCRIPT-

JIM HAROLD: A walking dead man – 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, and you are in the right place if you want to listen to spooky stories. Could be ghosts, could be strange cryptid creatures, could be UFOs, or my favorite, headscratchers – but whatever they are, they are true people, real people, everyday people like you and me telling their supernatural stories. Welcome to the program.

We do have a few news & notes items, but I want to save that till later because I want to jump right into these great Campfire stories – and here they are.

Next on the line is Ryan from Southern California. He found out about us from the great Astonishing Legends guys, so if by some chance you haven’t had a chance to listen to their show, make sure you do that. They are so kind, and they’re great podcasters. Some of the best out there, for sure. And Ryan has a story – I’m not going to spoil it; I just love the way he put it in the email to me. It’s very straightforward, and it has me chock full of questions, I guess I would say. Ryan, tell us what happened.

RYAN: Hi, Jim. Thanks. Good to be here. I’ve been looking forward to sharing this story with you and the listeners for a while. This story takes place back in the summer of 1996. I was on campus at a university outside of Washington D.C. and was walking through campus with my friends. It was summer, not that busy.

As we were going through the quad area, there’s a portion of the sidewalk that goes between two buildings, and we were walking and talking, and somebody was approaching. As this person approached, we realized it was somebody we both knew. More of a casual acquaintance. As he approached, we did the silent head nod and wave and kept on walking. Didn’t really think a lot about it except I remember both my friend and I noticed he wasn’t wearing shoes. We’re like, that’s kind of odd. But this guy was a free spirit, and we didn’t really think it was too weird for him. So we kept on going. This was during the week, I know, because we had been walking from class.

A couple days later, by the end of that week, we got the campus newspaper and there was a little headline in there. I did a double take, just like in the cartoons. There’s a picture of the kid that we knew, and it said that they were having a memorial service for him the next day or that weekend. I showed it to my friend and I was like, “We just saw him.” I don’t remember if it was a day or two days, but it was during the week, and it said that he had passed away in a car accident, I believe either the weekend before or in the previous week.

JIM HAROLD: Wow.

RYAN: We were like, “We just saw him. We just saw him the other day.” I called up the chapel where they were having the service, and they wouldn’t tell me a lot, frankly, about it, but I was like, “Can you confirm? It says that he passed away in an accident on this day. Is that correct?” They were like, “As far as we know, yes, that’s correct information.” So I don’t know; did we both see maybe him walking back through campus, or did we both see somebody that was his doppelganger? I don’t know. There was nobody else around nearby.

Even years later, we recall seeing this and not being able to explain it. Actually, I meant to go back and try to do some internet scouring to see if I could find anything online just to verify that, because this was so many years ago, but I haven’t. But yeah, that’s my story.

JIM HAROLD: Well, they say that people come back sometimes to places that are meaningful to them or those type of things, and maybe that was the case in this young person’s journey. But wow. Wow. And other than not having shoes on, he wasn’t transparent or anything like that? He looked like flesh and blood, like you or me?

RYAN: Absolutely, yeah. We walked right past each other on the sidewalk, too. We looked each other in the face. I remember I think he had a bag over his shoulder. This guy had kind of a unique look, too, so it wasn’t necessarily somebody that we would mistake for somebody else. I feel like in my mind, we might’ve seen him passing through someplace where he had had good times. It was on the quad, and he was definitely the kind of kid that would be out there playing hackysack or doing other stuff.

JIM HAROLD: Wow, what a great story. I mean, sad, obviously, someone losing their life, particularly that young, as a college student. But my gosh, wow. What a story. That one I think is going to stick with us. I know it’s going to stick with me. Ryan, thank you so much for being a part of the Campfire. Any final thoughts on this story and how it has informed your interest in all this stuff?

RYAN: No, it is one of those things that when I think back – I’m the kind of believer that’s skeptical, like I want to believe, I want to have some things happen, and then I realize – like this. I have another story I’d like to come on and tell you about the Del Coronado at some point. Something happened there. And some other stuff. So maybe I’ll come back and share those with you sometime.

JIM HAROLD: Please do. Thanks so much for being a part of the show, and stay spooky.

RYAN: Thanks, Jim. Stay spooky.

JIM HAROLD: Surana is back on the Campfire. She was on a couple months ago. We’re so glad to speak with her again. She’s calling in today from Massachusetts, and she’s going to take us back to when she was six or seven years old and tell us about something very interesting. Surana, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us, and please tell us what happened.

SURANA: Hello, Jim. Thank you for having me. I was probably six or seven. I was old enough to read, let’s put it that way. So I was about six or seven, and I went to a picnic with my mother, with one of her coworkers. She was Hispanic, and everybody at the party was speaking Spanish except for, of course, my mother’s friend and her sister, who were speaking to us in English. We were sitting at a picnic table, and Maria and her sister were sitting across from me. My mother was sitting on my right. There were about four older ladies, maybe aunties, sitting to the left of me on either side.

They’re talking, and I guess I wanted to be part of the conversation going on to the left of me because I just start talking Spanish. The ladies were eating their food; they stopped eating their food and they looked at me, and I continued to have a conversation with them. My mom’s friend’s mouth dropped. She’s like, “You didn’t tell me she spoke Spanish!” And my mother, with a very flat affect, was just like, “She doesn’t.” “But she’s speaking Spanish!” I was having this conversation with these ladies. I don’t remember exactly what it was I was saying, but I know I was making sense because they were talking back to me. My mother’s friend was still in disbelief. She’s shaking her head and she’s like, “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me she spoke Spanish,” and my mother kept saying, “She doesn’t.”

Her sister gets up, runs in the house, comes out with a book, and she starts asking me if I can read what’s in the book. I could kind of understand it, but I couldn’t read it like I read other things, so I was like, “No, not really.” That was weird right there, but I continued to speak with whomever wanted to talk to me.

But as I was sitting there and eating our picnic meal, our barbeque, I saw a gentleman at the end of the picnic tables near the entrance of the kitchen. He waved me over, and I looked at him and I looked around. “You’re looking at me? You’re waving at me?” And he waves me over. He was this tall man in a white suit with a red tie. Gray hair. Thin. I got up and I went toward him, and he gestures me into the kitchen.

As he gestures me into the kitchen, he points up above the stove – I don’t know if you remember those stoves that had cabinets above them – and he points up to the cabinet above the stove. He points there, and I point like “You want me to go in there?” He just nodded and pointed. So I get a chair, I climb up on the counter, and he gestures for me to open the cabinet. So I open the cabinet and I look at him again, and he gestures around, like to reach around. So I reach into the cabinet and I move this – I guess a wooden block out of the way, and I start pulling out this money. I looked at him and he’s nodding, and he gestures me to keep reaching.

So I just keep pulling out these wads of money. It wasn’t money I recognized. I guess it was some sort of different currency. I called it Spanish money. But as I’m pulling it all down, the ladies in the kitchen stop and they gasp. They’re like, “Oh my gosh, how did you know where to find this? Oh my gosh, oh my gosh!” I turn around to look for the man and he’s gone. So I go out in the backyard, I go in the room to the left, I go in the bathroom, I go into the living room, and I can’t find him anywhere. I do remember saying in Spanish, “Roja y blanca,” which is “white with red.” I was saying “white suit, red tie.”

As I go into the living room, I see a picture on one of those old console TVs, the ones with the feet on them. I see a picture on there and I point and I say, “There!” Everybody in the room, again, gasped and went dead silent. I was like, “Him!” I went back to look for him, and everybody is looking around. One of the ladies said, “We knew he was waiting for her.” I never saw him, but I did pick up on the fact that – oh, and then they said, “We knew he hid money in the house, but we didn’t know where he put it. We couldn’t find it anywhere.” So I guess he was a patriarch of the family that I don’t know how recently had died, but had died and had hidden money in the house, as some of the cultures do, and he’d just never told anybody where to find it before he passed.

So I found their Spanish ghost money, I guess I used to call it, and they were very surprised. I was blown away by what had happened, because I’m a kid trying to process it. But the saddest, saddest part was when we were leaving, I remember walking through the kitchen and I saw what I know now was his widow, just sitting in the living room with her chin on her hands and her hands on her cane, looking at the picture. My heart just broke for her.

JIM HAROLD: Do you think the part where you were speaking Spanish, that you were channeling him in a way? Like he was coming through you and allowing you to speak Spanish, or giving you that ability?

SURANA: I’m assuming so. I’ve always been good with languages. Even as a kid I was good with languages. But either that lifetime was a very close lifetime for me – but to me, there was just so much magic at that family gathering. There was so much love. The food was so good and everybody was so happy. I definitely think it put me in a conducive mood for that, because the next thing I know, there’s this man showing me where to find their family inheritance.

JIM HAROLD: So what did they think? You just of your own volition got up in a cabinet? No, they believed you. They believed that he was there.

SURANA: They believed me. They knew who I was talking about because that’s the only person that matched the description of what I was trying to say. And in the picture, he was waring the white suit and a red tie.

JIM HAROLD: How cool is that? I know you say you’ve got a really good Hat Man story. We’re going to run a little long on this one because that right there was such an awesome story. But you’ve got a touch act to follow. You’ve got to top yourself with this one, but you have a Hat Man story too, right?

SURANA: I do have a Hat Man story. This is up until the last – two summers ago. When I was a kid, I had a man in my dream that wore a hat, and he was menacing. Sometimes I could see his face with snarly teeth and a mustache, but he always had the hat and he was dark-figured. He used to be in my dreams. He would be in my dreams, he would haunt me. It bothered me so much that I would ask my mom, “I don’t know how to get rid of him,” and she was like, “Ignore him.” I said, “I can’t ignore him. He won’t let me.” He was just terrifying. I wasn’t a kid that was afraid of a lot of things because of so many things that I’d seen as a kid, but when I went to bed, this man showed up. It would terrify me.

But then I found a way to defuse him, and then I’d forgotten about him. I don’t know if you remember Rocky and Bullwinkle. There was a character in the cartoon called Snidely Whiplash with the mustache and the hat.

JIM HAROLD: Yes, exactly.

SURANA: So I turned him into Snidely Whiplash. As soon as I did that, whenever he showed up in my dreams, I would just laugh at him. I would point and laugh, and that was the last I really heard of him. I never had to deal with him in any other way because if he showed up, I was like, “Oh, Snidely!” and I would laugh and think of Dudley Do-Right and all those things. It would make me laugh. So I defused him, gone, out of my dreams.

Fast forward to about four years ago, and I’m taking my first Reiki 1 course. My Reiki instructor is telling us about how her daughter keeps seeing a dark man in a hat outside her window outside the street, standing next to the mailbox. She said, “I can’t see him, but I know she can. She’s like, ‘No, Mom, he’s right there, he’s right there.’” She said she started gritting her yard and saged her home, saged her child. She did all the protection she could, and eventually this man stopped hanging around her house. As far as I know, he never got in, and he wasn’t in her dreams. She was wide awake when she saw him standing outside the window. But that was like, huh, that’s weird. I was like, that sounds familiar to me. A man in a hat who’s watching you and just menacing you. I was like, okay.

Two years later, I am seeing a friend of mine who is a practicing shaman. He’s not Native American, but he practices shamanism. I’m having a session with him, and at the end of the session he’s like, “Surana, I have to ask you a question.” I said, “What?” He said, “Do you remember anything – does a man in a hat ring any bells for you?” I was like, “A man in a hat? No, why do you say that?” I guess he had been having trouble with an entity that had been trying to get into his house, in the window, just kept trying to get in and was a menace. Just constantly at him, at him, at him. Finally he turned around and he was like, “What is it that you want?” and he said, “Ask Surana.”

JIM HAROLD: Ooh. Ooh!

SURANA: I know, that’s what I said. I said, “Ask Surana? He said my name?” He said, “Ask Surana. You would know what he wanted.” I was like, okay. It took me about a day or two to process it, and I realized who it was. In that day or two – I saw him a few days later and he’s like, “I’ve been dealing with this all summer. I’ve got a little bit of PTSD from it because every time I see a shadow, I think it’s him trying to get in the house.” And he has kids to protect.

Apparently he was coming home from a sound meditation from Rhode Island, and this entity showed up in the backseat of his car and took over the wheel. Not took over the wheel – took him over. He could not move. He said, “I couldn’t move, I couldn’t turn the wheel. There was nothing I could do. And all he did was sit in the backseat of the car and laugh and chuckle.” I said, “That I do remember. I do remember the chuckling and the laughing and the pointing the fingers and making fun and just being a pure menace.”

He’s like, “My spiritual team took over, they got me into the driveway, and when I got into the driveway I broke down. I just stayed there and cried for like 10 minutes because I was terrified.” I said, “Wow. He never came after me like that. It was always in my dreams, and I was a child.” I didn’t have anything else to give him as far as enlightenment on the situation.

Eventually, he’s gone away; he has stopped bothering him. I guess he didn’t give him the attention that he needs, because he does need attention. He didn’t give him the attention he needs, and he hasn’t heard from him or been bothered by him for the last year. But I was like, wow. What is the coincidence there? I’m seven, I’m a child and I’m having these dreams, and then I meet up with a Reiki instructor whose child is having experiences with a similar entity, and then my friend, who is a shaman, also a lightworker, has another experience – and his was far more menacing than anybody else’s experience. But it seems like they came after the children with a little less fervor than they did with him. With him, they really did work hard at trying to intimidate and harm him.

JIM HAROLD: Seems like you’re very tuned in, Surana. Very tuned in indeed, in your younger years through to this day.

SURANA: I thought I had pushed that all to the back of the world, but apparently it still comes after you. [laughs] If you’ve got something you need to recognize spiritually, it never does you any good to try to ignore it. It really doesn’t. It took a minute for me to remember about that person or that entity that was really, really bothering me as a child, and to connect the dots, but yeah, I guess so.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah. Both stories were great, but the first one, whew, that is amazing to be guided. That was a happy ending in a way. It was sad about the widow, as you said, but happy –

SURANA: But she knew he was there, yeah.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah. It was happy in the sense you were able to help him get the family that money that they so richly deserved and he had left for them, but they just didn’t know where it was at. Surana, thank you for being a part today of the Campfire.

SURANA: Thank you very much, Jim. Stay spooky!

JIM HAROLD: Stay spooky!

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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: Just a couple quick notes before we get back to the stories. First of all, if you are in the Canton, Ohio area, I hope you will join me at the Small Town Monsters Monster Fest on June 3rd. They actually have a movie the night before, June 2nd, as well. You can get those tickets over at smalltownmonsters.com/stmmonsterfest. Again, that is smalltownmonsters.com/stmmonsterfest. It’ll be a great time. I’m going to be there. The Astonishing Legends guys are going to be there, Lyle Blackburn, Shannon LeGro, a lot of luminaries. And we’ll be doing a meet & greet after that day on the evening of the 3rd with the Astonishing Legends guys. So please check it out and get your tickets today if you’re in the Canton, Ohio area.

Something totally separate, not related, is my tour. As I’ve mentioned before, we’re trying to determine if we’re in a go or no-go situation. We’re coming down literally to the eleventh hour. I hope that you will get your tickets if you’re in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, or Boston for Stories From Around the Campfire. You can get your tickets to that at jimharold.com/tour. Again, jimharold.com/tour. And to be totally clear, the tour is totally separate from Monster Fest. Two totally different things. I hope whatever makes sense for you, we see you at.

And one other note before we get back to the stories, and I’ll try to keep it brief: Last week I had admitted to feeling some self-doubt about the shows and about myself a little bit, and you guys were fantastic. You cheered me right up, and I’m good to go. And thank you so much. I can’t even begin to say how touched I was by the many responses in my emails, social media. Just amazing. You guys are fantastic. So many messages of love and concern. Everything’s fine; I’m good! I was just feeling a little sad for myself. I’m good now. All is good. I’m excited. In fact, I’ve got a couple of new projects I’m working on that I haven’t told you about yet that I’m very excited about, and more to come on those in the coming weeks.

But first, let’s get back to these great Campfire stories – and thank you again for just being the sweetest people in the world.

Megan is on the line from Kansas City, and we’re so glad to have her on the show. She found out about us from Christine and Em over at And That’s Why We Drink. They’re always so supportive of the shows, and we appreciate it. She’s going to tell us about the Green Man Who Hates Men. Now, I’ll tell you, the thing I love about Campfire is there’s always something new. Even after doing this for almost 14 years, there’s always something new. I’ve never had a story about a green man – well, I did have a man that was glowing green, but this sounds a little bit different. Megan, welcome to the show, and please tell us your story.

MEGAN: Hi. Thanks, Jim. Yeah, this is definitely a different experience, for sure. This takes place back in 2007. My now-husband and I had decided – we were living in Charlotte, North Carolina – that we were going to invest in a condo and wanted something with a little bit of charm, so we found one that was built in the 1940s. It had all the charm of an older house: original plaster walls, molding, hardwood floors with all the nicks and stains in it. We fell in love with it. A lot of history to it. The two bedrooms were on the top floor, and then the rest of the living was downstairs. This will be important later.

We lived in it for several months, loved it, having the best time in our mid-twenties as only mid-twenties can do. We were both working at the time and leaving around the same time every morning. My boss was suddenly being very nice and decided that if you had all your work done, you didn’t need to come in until 10 o’clock in the morning. This left me sleeping alone in the condo for the first time without an alarm and without my then-boyfriend, Rhett, because he had to leave for work around 6 a.m.

Whenever this would happen, I would get sleep paralysis. At the time I had no clue what sleep paralysis was, but on those mornings that I was able to sleep in, right at daybreak, I would start to feel my bed shake. I would wake up and look around the room and realize that I couldn’t move, but nothing really crazy happened. I always fell back asleep and woke up about an hour or so later, not really sure if that was a reoccurring dream or what was going on.

Fast forward to about a year later, I got a new job where I had to travel a whole bunch. Couldn’t sleep in anymore. This actually left my boyfriend, Rhett, alone for the first time ever in the condo, sleeping. This is an important fact that’ll come back later. Also, when I had this job, I had zero sleep paralysis. Zero of those reoccurring dreams where I’d wake up at daybreak at all.

Rhett and I ended up getting married, and he got a job in Kansas City. I had decided to get my master’s, so I was once again sleeping in because my classes were all later, and I was once again alone in the condo. This is when those sleep paralysis issues started ramping up and started happening again. Every time I slept in, I would wake up at daybreak glued to my bed and couldn’t move my arms or anything.

After a couple weeks of this, things started to get really intense. I would be looking around the room and I started to notice a pressure on my chest, and I would begin to panic. I also was aware of my dog, sleeping next to me, making all those cute little doggy noises. So I started to think, “Okay, this isn’t a dream because I’m fully aware of what’s going on.” After a couple of times of those, I started to notice at the top landing of the stairs a man standing there.

JIM HAROLD: Oh boy.

MEGAN: Yeah. I would wake up – and I always slept with my door open. I don’t know why; I always have. But I would wake up glued to my bed and I would see this figure standing there. Now, here’s the strange part: I never felt scared of this figure. I only would feel panicky that I couldn’t move, but when I would see this figure standing out there, I always felt a real calmness come over me.

That happened again for a couple of weeks, and then it was almost like this figure was testing the waters. It got closer and closer, until one time when I woke up in that state, it was standing right at my door, right in front of me, because the foot of my bed faced the door. And I could tell at this point that it was an old man. He was really grumpy-looking, and he had this greenish aura to him. Kind of like his skin was all green-colored. It reminded me of a very Scooby Doo type creature. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: “Zoinks, Scoob! He’s green!” [laughs]

MEGAN: Exactly. But it was weird, though, because even though he looked super grumpy, I never felt threatened by him. I only felt anxious that I couldn’t move. This happened often enough, almost every time that I slept in, that I began to think, “These aren’t reoccurring dreams. Something is happening here.” But I never told Rhett about it because I’ve always been really sensitive; I’ve always had lots of experiences, and he’s never interested in hearing any of them. [laughs] He’s just not into it at all.

So I never told him about any of it, but I did try to investigate our condo to see if there were any deaths or anything. I found out that the condos were built to house unwed soldiers during World War II, so as they came back they were able to live there. When I looked up deaths, because of the age, and I’m guessing because of all the issues with the soldiers coming home, there were way too many suicides for me to even want to investigate further. So I quickly shut down that search and just let it go and moved to Kansas City.

But then here’s where it gets really weird. When I met Rhett in Kansas City, we decided to rent out our condo because it was 2010, the housing market had crashed, and we wouldn’t have gotten very much money for it. We went through a lot of renters the first few years. After doing this – and it’s never fun renting, let alone renting from across country – I jokingly said to Rhett, “Maybe it’s not renting because it’s haunted.” I was joking, but I was actually in my mind thinking seriously, “Okay, that guy is real. These weren’t dreams, something is going on.”

I expected Rhett to just laugh it off and we would move on with finding the next renter. He completely went deadpan – not at all what I was thinking – looked at me straight in the eye and was like, “What do you mean? Why? Did you see something?” I just stared at him, and he’s like, “Because I’m pretty sure I did.”

JIM HAROLD: Whoa.

MEGAN: Yeah. I was like, “Okay, so what did you see?” Like, let’s go, what went on? He proceeded to tell me that when I was gone traveling for my job in Florida, and only when he was sleeping in the condo by himself, so Saturdays and Sundays when he got to sleep in, only when I was in Florida, he would wake up glued to the bed with a very angry old man standing right over him, almost like he was pinning him to the bed, and he had this greenish glow to his skin.

JIM HAROLD: Oh man. Yikes.

MEGAN: He also said that he was never really afraid of this guy, but it seemed like the old man was pinning him to the bed, yelling at him, but he couldn’t hear anything. It was just this green, angry guy, right on top of him.

JIM HAROLD: So he was very nice to you, but not so nice to your husband.

MEGAN: Yeah, like he was just casually watching me sleep, making sure everything was okay. And interestingly enough, as he was telling me this, I obviously told him my experience and we started freaking out and realizing, “Okay, maybe this guy is real and he’s there.” And then we were thinking about the first three renters that we had and then this last one; they were all either young men or men in their mid-thirties. They obviously left fairly quickly. W were getting frustrated. We’re like, “Okay, we’re not going to say anything yet. We’re not going to bring in the sage or anything.”

We found our next renter. It was a middle-aged woman in her mid-forties, and she ended up staying for over five years without any issues.

JIM HAROLD: Interesting. The Green Man. The more you told that, I remembered a little bit of that story – because I said it was a unique story, and it is a unique story, but there was – and I think it may have involved a soldier, actually. It’s interesting that you mentioned that, because this was a story – and this goes back to maybe 2009/2010 when we very first started this show. Somebody talked about they lived I think in New England, and there was a lot of Revolutionary War stuff and history up there. They would see this green ghost, and I looked like a Revolutionary War soldier. So that’s really interesting. Maybe that’s the way soldiers present themselves, in green. You think about uniforms in the military, especially in the U.S., are green, and many other countries too. So maybe that’s a thing. That’s really interesting.

MEGAN: I hadn’t actually thought of that. That is really interesting. Huh.

JIM HAROLD: That’s why we do the Campfire, to have these great discussions. I don’t know any answers; we just bounce around these ideas and try to ponder this mystery called life. Megan, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your great story.

MEGAN: Absolutely. Thank you, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: Cory is on the line from California. He found the show about a year ago, and we’re so glad he did. He’s going to take us back to his college days when he was working at an Italian restaurant – that makes me hungry – but it had a little extra side dish: a haunting. And we’re going to hear all about it. Cory, welcome to the show and tell us what happened.

CORY: Hi, thank you. While I was working at an Italian restaurant in college, there were always rumors that the building was haunted. Previous establishments were a bank and a bar. Both of them, the rumors were they both burned down. I don’t have any confirmation that that actually happened, but while we were doing construction in the attic on the fire suppression system, actually, upstairs, the next day I came in early in the morning. We were only open for dinner during the weekdays. I was setting up the restaurant, getting everything ready. The restaurant was set up into three different rooms. Each of them was separated by an arch to make it a more family-friendly atmosphere.

As I was setting up the salt and pepper in the middle room, something kept telling me “Turn around.” I kept feeling like something was watching me. As I’m walking out, heading to the first room, I turn around real quick to look and behind me I see a shadow or a dark figure of some sort. It was a head, shoulders, and torso, what looked like a person standing from behind the arch. You could only see half his body. It was spooky because it was so dark. You couldn’t see any actual details of what it was, but you could definitely tell he was looking at you and was aware of what it was. It definitely felt like a man for some reason, without being able to see any features. He wasn’t angry or aggressive or anything; it felt like he was wondering what I was doing there more than anything. He was fully aware of what I was doing.

It was probably like half a second that I saw him. Then I turned around and started walking away, got really spooked out. I started walking away. As I’m heading out of the middle room into the first room, the tray I was carrying with all the salt and pepper on it got smacked out of my hand.

JIM HAROLD: Wow.

CORY: At that point I was like, “Okay, I’m done. I can’t do it.” Those two little things sent me over the edge of “I’ve got to leave the building.” I’ve never really been a skeptic or a believer; I’ve been in that middle ground of “What I don’t see can’t hurt me and what I do see is there,” I guess, best way to explain it.

So I leave the restaurant, I call the manager, I’m like, “Hey, can you come down? I need to finish setting up, but there’s someone in the restaurant.” He comes down and we search the area. There’s no one in the restaurant. I’m like, all right, maybe I’m just seeing things. I chalk it up to early morning shift after a night shift, I’m tired, and nothing was actually there.

I would say about two weeks later, me and the bartender were talking. I was getting frustrated with how the shift was going and everything that’d been happening in general. As I’m talking to her, I’m putting a lot of negative out there, and she’s talking me down and calming me down. As we’re getting to the end of our conversation, the soda gun that’s at the end of the bar that would only be able to get access if someone walked past us came out of its little holster, straight up and out, and slammed down onto the ice cover that was covering the ice. At that point I was like, there’s definitely something going on. Don’t really know what it is or what’s going on, but yeah.

JIM HAROLD: When you have salt and pepper shakers knocked out of your hand, that goes from a haunting to a poltergeist, really, if you think about it. Yeah, that’s pretty scary. And it’s interesting you said you’re not given to this kind of stuff. If you see it, you believe it. But you saw it and you experienced it. Has that changed your thought of all this stuff?

CORY: I definitely think it changed the way I think about what’s out there and what’s going on. I think after that I’ve been I would say more open to the idea of something more being out there, so it’s not just a bump in the night, it’s more of “is there actually something behind what just happened?” After I worked in that restaurant, I moved to Missouri and worked in a prison for four years, and there have been a lot of experiences there where I have to just chalk it up to either being paranormal or I’m just going crazy at that point. So it definitely changed my belief of what’s out there.

JIM HAROLD: Very interesting indeed. Cory, thank you so much for sharing your story about working in a haunted Italian restaurant. Now I’ve got to go have lunch.

CORY: [laughs] Thank you.

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JIM HAROLD: Victoria is on the line from Northamptonshire, England in the UK, and we’re so glad to have her on the line. Appreciate all of our listeners in the UK. She’s going to tell us about her experience in living in what may have very well been a haunted house. Victoria, thank you so much for joining us, and tell us what happened.

VICTORIA: Hello, Jim. This happened to me back in 1998. We moved into our first family home. It was a lovely little stone cottage, quite modest, three bedrooms, with me, my husband, our oldest boy, my stepson who was then nine, and I was six months pregnant.

As soon as we moved in, strange things started to happen. The first thing that happened is we were moving in, carrying our things through the hallway into the house, and my husband had placed three framed A5 pictures of my stepson when he was five. They’re really cute pictures. He was sucking a lolly, riding his bike, and standing looking happy. He’d leant them up on the shelf on the side of the hallway. We carried our boxes through, we came back, and these three photographs had not only fallen from the shelf, they’d been placed in a completely straight line face up, all facing the same direction, away from the wall. My husband said, “What’d you do that for?” I said, “I never touched them.” Elliot was upstairs. He never touched them. We thought, “How odd!”

So we were busy moving. We moved into one side, we moved in, and within a week or two we noticed the light bulbs in the kitchen kept blowing. We thought, “Oh no, maybe it’s electrical fault.” Then the next thing we saw is I started to see what I think now was a shadow person. At the time I didn’t realize. But I was in the bathroom, washing myself in the sink, and across the side of the bathroom door I saw what I thought was my husband walk past the bathroom door and into the bedroom. I was so convinced it was him. I come into the bedroom, talking to my husband, into the bedroom – there’s nobody there. I thought, “That’s really odd.” I just thought, “Oh, that’s a surprise.” I mentioned it to my husband, didn’t think anything of it.

And then the same thing happened to my husband. A couple of weeks later, he was in the bath, saw me walk past into the bedroom. He got out completely naked, came into the bedroom to talk to me – there was no one there. He said he felt quite vulnerable because he was naked, and he was certain that someone had walked past the door.

Anyway, this kept happening. We thought it must’ve been a trick of the light. The baby was born, and then we started to notice other things. He was probably about four to six months old. We kept seeing the shadows, the light bulbs kept going, and my husband’s experience was the baby was in the small room and he was a bit grizzly, so he went in, over to the cot, and he was aware of me coming in behind him. He said the baby turned, looked behind him, and basically stopped crying, big grin, started gurgling. Derek turned around to talk to me – there was nobody there. It really creeped him out because he said the baby was continuing to look at somebody or something behind him.

I remember he came down and told me, and my experience was I was bathing the baby in the bath, and same thing, he looked over my shoulder, big smile – and at the same time I felt this energy. It was just like some big person had leant right in over my shoulder, and it was so strong, Jim, I shouted out and I turned, “Ah!” Like that. Nobody there. Didn’t like it at all.

Anyway, the baby got older. By the time he was one year old, everything had stopped. Nothing at all. We carried on. A year and a half later, I was pregnant with my second son, and it all started again. The light bulbs started to pop, I started to see the shadow past the bathroom door. And then we started to see it in other places. We had very steep stairs that went down to the back door. My husband saw the shadow going down to the back door. He saw it coming out and going up the stairs.

The worst time for me was I was heavily pregnant, nine months pregnant. I was off work. Baby number one was upstairs asleep, and I was washing up in the sink, and for some reason I felt – you know when you get all the hairs go up on the back of your neck, the creeps? I turned to the side and I saw this black shadow dash from the bottom of the stairs to the back door. I just froze, and I kid you not, the back door handle – it was one of those lever handles – went ever so slowly all the way down and then all the way back up again. Honestly, the tears came down my eyes. I just froze. I ran to the back door and I shook it, and it was wobbly – I don’t know. It wasn’t windy. Didn’t like that at all.

The baby was born and we swapped the two little baby boys into the big room, and we put Elliot, bless him – he was now 11 – into the small room. The minute we put that boy in the small room, he couldn’t sleep. He started coming into our room every night. Couldn’t sleep. He was never one for nightmares. In fact, he looked so embarrassed, I didn’t have the heart to send him back to his bedroom. We ended up getting a mattress that he’d pull out, and he’d just come in, get into bed, sleep there the night.

He had a friend who used to come and stay a lot, and one day he said, “Aaron doesn’t want to come and stay again.” We said, “Why not? What happened?” Aaron, bless him, got up in the night to go to the toilet, and when he came out of the bathroom, just before he walked back in the bedroom, he looked back and he said to my stepson, “There was a man who came out of the bathroom wearing green clothes, and he looked at me.” He would never come back to stay in the house again. I felt awful for him.

And then Elliot had a dream and he said he woke up to see a man in green clothes that was standing at the end of the bed, watching him. It all tended to be in that small room. He said, “I think it was just a dream.” It was pretty creepy.

Again, the same things happened. The little baby would follow things with his eyes, and then as he got older, by the time he was one, it all settled down again. We stopped seeing the shadows. The light bulbs stopped blowing. We almost forgot about it. What was so weird about the house – it had the most lovely energy and presence. I loved that house. Anyone who came to visit loved the house. When we sold the house, the estate agent used to say, “I love showing your house because it’s so nice to sit in. It’s got such a lovely feel.”

I had a very, very strong sense every now and then, even when the children were older – I thought as long as I ignored it, it would ignore me. We stayed there for four years. We sold the house. I live in a very small village, and I told a couple of my friends what had happened. Well, the lady I sold the house to, about three months after she moved in – because we only moved across the road – she came to see me and she said, “I wanted to ask you if you had any funny things happen in the house.” I felt terrible. You’re not going to say, “Two years ago we think the house was haunted.” I said, “We did have some funny things.”

Her children were five and eight when she moved in, and she said what had happened to her was she would notice the light bulbs blowing in the kitchen and things moved. I said, “What do you mean?” She said she’d set the ironing board up one end of the kitchen, gone out of the room, come back, and the ironing board had moved from one side of the room all the way to the other side of the room.

JIM HAROLD: Oh my. That seems like it was a very haunted place.

VICTORIA: Yeah. And I spoke to her later on and she said it all stopped. A couple of months and then nothing. So I don’t know if it was just interested in babies – I felt like it was sort of kind, but I didn’t like it around my babies because I didn’t understand it and it creeped me out. But I didn’t get the sense at all that it was malevolent. I felt it just liked being around the babies, really.

JIM HAROLD: Something I’ve got to tell you – sometimes on the show we’ll say the show produces itself. We’ll get people who have similar calls on the same – for example, today I’ll be taking calls for about five hours. Then we put those and mix and match them together to put together the whole show. And the caller before last called us about a green man ghost in their house. Now, this actually wasn’t wearing green; he might’ve been wearing green, but he was glowing green. It’s weird because I said, “We’ve only had one story in the history of Campfire about a green ghost,” and we’ve had two in the last 15 minutes. That’s pretty wild. I always think that that’s a wink and a nod from the universe saying, “I see what you’re doing down there with this Campfire show.” Because we’ll have people call about similar things back to back or within an hour of each other, and we’ve never had such a call. So in addition to a great story, that’s a nice little wrinkle.

VICTORIA: Thank you ever so much for listening. You always think your own experiences are a bit boring, but I’ve been really interested in other people’s experiences when they were pregnant, because they often say you can be a bit more sensitive around that time, don’t they?

JIM HAROLD: That makes sense. It makes a lot of sense to me. Folks, post on the Virtual Campfire Group, virtualcampfiregroup.com, which takes you to the Facebook group, if you’ve had an experience while you were pregnant. That would be very, very interesting. Victoria, thank you so much for sharing this very fun and interesting Campfire story.

VICTORIA: Thank you, Jim. Stay spooky!

JIM HAROLD: Stay spooky!

Next up on the line is Michelle from Boston, and if she sounds great – she’s calling from a recording studio. How neat is that? She has a story about the ghost that lives in her parents’ house, and I can’t wait to hear it. Michelle, thank you for joining us today. I appreciate it, and tell us what happened.

MICHELLE: Thank you for having me, Jim. This experience comes from my house that I grew up in. My parents still live there today. To give a little bit of a backstory, the first family who ever lived in our house tragically lost their 12-year-old daughter in 1971 when she was shot to death by her 11-year-old brother.

JIM HAROLD: Oh my goodness.

MICHELLE: So a lot of the hauntings that we have in the home, we attribute to her. The second family who moved in built the house the way it is today, and that man died in the master bedroom of natural causes, and then my family moved in.

The very first incident happened when I was about 11 years old and my sister was 7. We were up one night, just talking to each other. Dad comes in and says, “Okay, girls, it’s time for bed. Get ready.” So I went into the bathroom and my sister went into her room. I’m in there for a couple of minutes, and then I come out and I see my sister standing in the doorway of my bedroom, facing into my room, talking to somebody. I think, “That’s odd.” I can’t see much of my bed from where I’m standing, so I watch her for a couple seconds and then I go, “Leah, who are you talking to?”

She turns around, sees me, shock comes over her face, and she screams and starts crying. Now, being the older sister, that usually means I’m in trouble. [laughs] I go, “Leah, whoa, whoa, what’s wrong? What happened? I’m sorry I scared you.” She says, “How did you get behind me so fast?” I said, “I didn’t. I’ve been in the bathroom for the last several minutes.” She goes, “No! No you weren’t! You were sitting at your vanity brushing your hair over your face.”

When I asked my sister to recount this a couple of days ago, she said not only is this incident burned into her brain, but she remembers very distinctly that whoever was sitting at my vanity was wearing a nightgown that was very similar to one that I used to wear.

Not much happens in our house after that until I’m in college. This is the second, probably biggest encounter we had, and it was my mother’s experience. My mom comes home from the grocery store one day, she opens up the front door, and when you open the door to the front of our house, the first thing you see is our two-car garage. She opens up the door; she happens to look over towards where my dad’s truck is parked, and she sees this little girl standing against my dad’s truck with her arms folded in what seems to be a detective’s outfit, like a little cape and a hat, kind of like old Sherlock Holmes. She’s looking at my mom with this very challenging stare.

My mom drops her grocery bags and without even thinking about it, she charges after this girl and yells, “Get out of my house!”

JIM HAROLD: Whoa.

MICHELLE: Yeah. The way my mom recalls this is that she looked shocked, and this little girl runs around the other side of my dad’s truck. What’s interesting about this is not only is she solid, but she’s very, very aware of her surroundings. She’s putting her hands on my dad’s truck. She’s watching her feet so she doesn’t trip over my dad’s tools near his workbench. You know how kids do when they chase each other around an object? This is what my mom and this girl do for a little bit.

In the middle of this encounter, my mom says that she went from wearing this detective’s outfit to a black outfit, almost like she was wearing a ninja costume, as weird as that sounds.

JIM HAROLD: So it just shifted by itself? It was nothing that she did; it was just like all of a sudden – it’s kind of like, if people remember Samantha on Bewitched when she would just snap her fingers and the clothes would change. It was like that?

MICHELLE: Yeah, it morphed into something that maybe she thought was going to help her in this scenario, like change into something sneakier. But anyway, after a little bit of a back and forth, this entity realized that she wasn’t getting away from my mom, and she runs to the back of my dad’s truck and she vanishes through the garage door – which used to be the original front door to our home. Then my mom was like, “What did I just do?” [laughs] “I just dropped everything and chased after her.”

We didn’t actually see a full-bodied apparition for a time after that, but interestingly enough, she started to appear at the neighbor’s house. Now, the neighbor’s house wasn’t built until I was well into high school, so this house didn’t exist in her time. But a couple of encounters that they’ve had is the neighbor’s son came home one day, he comes into their house and he goes, referring to our house, “They put that creepy old witch statue out in the yard again.” His mom goes, “What creepy old witch statue?” She goes to the window and there’s nothing out there. She’s like, “There’s no witch statue out there.” He swears that he saw a female figure with long, dark clothes standing in the yard. Again, that’s a completely different outfit.

JIM HAROLD: Wow, that’s weird.

MICHELLE: Yeah. They’ve seen a little girl with long dark hair in their basement. Our neighbor even had an encounter where he was watching TV and he thought he heard his daughter say, “Ha! I found you!” and peek around the corner. He went to chase her and she was upstairs in her bedroom with the door closed.

JIM HAROLD: That is just weird.

MICHELLE: Yeah. The paranormal encounters in our home are a lot of little things now. My parents are just used to it. We hadn’t seen an entity for a really long time, until just recently in December. My dad was sitting watching TV; my mom was down the hall in the bathroom. While he’s watching TV, he swears he sees my mom come down the hallway, go into the kitchen, and start moving things around, doors opening and closing, whatever.

He sees something really interesting on the news and he goes, “Cindy, come over here! I need you to see this.” And my mom calls from the bathroom, “Are you talking to me?” My dad, being a former police officer, is like, “There’s somebody in the house.” So he gets up, he runs into the kitchen, and there’s nobody there. But he swears he saw what he assumed was my mother walk into the kitchen and start moving stuff around.

JIM HAROLD: One of those doppelganger stories, kind of bookending that one with you and your sister. That whole doppelganger thing is something I totally underestimated before I started doing this show. I’d heard of it, but I never knew it was so common. So many people have called in and said, “There was a doppelganger of me,” “There was a doppelganger of somebody else. They seem just as real as you or me.” Then I’ve heard people say it’s slightly off, it’s not exactly the same. But I mean, so many of these. And I think it’s one of the creepier things.

MICHELLE: Right. And I’ve never heard of an entity just changing outfits in the middle of an encounter.

JIM HAROLD: Right, that’s a new one.

MICHELLE: Or changing the way they look just to suit the situation.

JIM HAROLD: It’s gotten, I guess, maybe your family into paranormal investigation?

MICHELLE: Yes, it has. We’ve been interested in it for a very long time. I didn’t actually get into investigating until COVID happened when I had some time on my hands, and now I’m hooked and my parents are hooked on it. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: Very cool. Very cool indeed. So no plans on them leaving the house? This isn’t scaring them from the house? It sounds like it’s actually fascinating to them and everybody in the family.

MICHELLE: Yeah, it’s nothing malicious. It’s never been anything malicious. If anything, it’s been playful, and now it just happens so often – little things, footsteps, cabinet doors opening and closing, little things. Jewelry missing a lot. It’s a little annoying, but they’re happy with it. They find it fascinating.

JIM HAROLD: It is indeed. Michelle, thank you so much for being a part of the Campfire, and stay spooky!

MICHELLE: Thank you.

JIM HAROLD: Jim Harold’s Campfire is brought to you by BetterHelp. You know, I think many people, particularly of my generation, the sandwich generation where you’ve got older parents and you’ve got kids, whether they’re young or teenagers or in college or whatever the case might be – you kind of find yourself in the middle. I know that I’m this way, and I feel like I’m always doing things for other people, and also my job. I do a lot of work for my job – and I love it, don’t get me wrong – but sometimes we don’t spend enough time on ourselves so we can take better care of other people.

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You’re listening to Jim Harold’s Campfire.

JIM HAROLD: Adam is on the line from Utah and we’re so glad to have him here. He’s going to tell us about an experience he had a number of years ago and the importance that his late brother had in that experience. Adam, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us, and thank you for sharing a very personal story.

ADAM: Thank you, Jim. I appreciate you having me on. A number of years ago, I was living in a town south of Salt Lake City and where I was living was situated in and around the Provo area. Where I was living, it was kind of like a community area, not quite the typical apartment. My room was in the back southwest corner of the building. It was a three-level building. There was the basement, the main level, which was where my room was, and then there was the third story.

The room above me, from what I’d been told, at one point a former resident that had been living there had been into the occult and stuff and using a Ouija board, and for whatever reason, he didn’t close the door properly.

JIM HAROLD: The spiritual door, you mean.

ADAM: Yeah, the spiritual door. He didn’t finish the whole séance or whatever. He didn’t finish it properly. I was told that some people believe that some things had gotten through.

Right there I’m going to pause and backtrack a little bit. In the early 2000s, my brother had been serving in the military and was killed in action. He and I had actually been pretty close, so to lose somebody like that was a little bit rough.

JIM HAROLD: Of course. First of all, we appreciate your brother’s service. I know it’s been a long time, but I lost a brother in 1999, and that’s a hurt that doesn’t go away, so my condolences to you.

ADAM: Thank you, Jim. I appreciate that. One thing about my brother is he was extremely protective of his family. Always had been. And I believe that even now, on the other side, he still is.

Back to my story. My room, just a quick setup, there was a dresser and a La-Z-Boy recliner on the south wall, and then on the north wall was my bed, and above this bed was a painting of my brother that a friend of mine had done around the time that my brother passed away. I still have it; it’s one of my prized possessions. I absolutely love it.

One night, I was fast asleep and I woke up, and in my mind’s eye I could see a man sitting in my recliner. He was dressed in the early turn-of-the-century clothing, you know, the suits with the high stiff collar, the tie and all that stuff. I could see everything clearly up to the point of his shoulders, but everything from his shoulders up was completely in shadow. I couldn’t see any facial features or anything like that. But I could tell that whoever or whatever this man was – actually, to this day I refer to him as “The Century Man” because that’s how he was dressed – and I could tell that he wanted to hurt me. He meant me great harm.

Now, some people would say “You were probably just dreaming.” No. I remember very vividly the feeling of my sheets and the comforter laying on top of me. In that moment, I was really scared. But then I remembered my brother’s painting hanging above me, and I called out to him and said, “Hey, I could really use your help right now.” As soon as I had that thought, immediately I felt my brother’s presence in the room. For lack of a better way of telling it, essentially The Century Man ran screaming from the room.

JIM HAROLD: Wow.

ADAM: My brother was not one to mess with. [laughs] So I’m sure as soon as he showed up, The Century Man was like, “I’m out.”

JIM HAROLD: The Century Man, as you called him, ran screaming from the room.

ADAM: That’s kind of the feeling that I got, yeah. Because as soon as my brother showed up, this guy was gone. It was instantaneous.

JIM HAROLD: So when your brother showed up, in what form was he?

ADAM: I couldn’t really see a form or anything. I could just tell that he was there.

JIM HAROLD: You could feel his presence.

ADAM: Yeah.

JIM HAROLD: I believe that’s absolutely possible. You think about it, probably by nature – and you said this – your brother was a protector, he passed protecting us all, and it carried over to the other side. I was just talking to a psychic, an expert in this area. Not a psychic, but an expert in this area who’s done a lot of study. Even she said there are no experts when it comes to this. But her feeling, and I’ve heard this said many times, is that whatever kind of person you are on this side, that’s going to be the kind of person you are on the other side. If you’re a great person, you’re a protector, you help people, those kind of things, that’s what you’re going to be on the other side. If you’re not such a nice person, that’s what you’re going to be on the other side. So it sounds like your brother’s personality carried over.

ADAM: Yeah. I strongly believe that. I have a couple other stories about encounters involving my brother, but I’ll save those for another time.

JIM HAROLD: Well, Adam, thank you so much. Again, our condolences on your brother.

ADAM: Thank you.

JIM HAROLD: So many service members over the years have given their lives, and I appreciate all our service members, living and those who have passed, whether through combat or being stationed somewhere or just natural causes. I just think it’s so important – and I’m speaking as an American, obviously. We have people in other countries, and I’m sure they feel the same way about their people who have served them. But I just have a special place in my heart, having had a dad who served – not in combat, but who served. I really think so highly of our military and thank them for what we do. And Adam, thank you for what you did sharing this very personal story on the Campfire.

ADAM: Thank you, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: Rhea is on the line from England, and we’re so glad to have her with us today. We really appreciate her taking time. Her sister Amy told her about the show. Amy, thank you so much. See, that’s how it works: folks tell their friends and family about the show and then you hear great stories like the one you’re about to hear. Rhea, multiple odd things happening in your house. Tell us all about it.

RHEA: Hi, Jim. I moved into a house – I don’t live there anymore – I moved in in 2016. I never really felt like it was homely at all. I think I can pick up energies and stuff like that, so I just felt like it wasn’t home. So we’re first moving in, I’ve got a daughter. I’m a single mum, so it’s just me, my daughter, and my dog that lived there. At first when we got settled, I noticed taps would be left on. Being a busy mum and work, I just thought “Oh, I’ve just left the tap on.” Then I noticed drawers kept being opened, particularly in the kitchen.

There was a room in the house – there was the kitchen and then the dining room next to the kitchen. I never really used the room. I had the dining table in there and I had a drying clotheshorse in there, so when I’d done my washing I’d put the drying in there, but I never really used it. It just felt dark in there. That was the main room I avoided in the house.

After some time, my sister came to visit me. We went out to the beach one day, we came home, and always when I walked into the kitchen I’d stick my hand through into this other room to turn the light on, because like I said, it was dark. So I put my hand through, went to put the light on. The light didn’t go on. I thought, “Oh, that’s odd.” I opened the door and the light bulb wasn’t in the light. I was like, “Oh, that is odd.” It was a screw light bulb, and it was actually the other side of the room. I was like, “Amy, come look at this. Am I going crazy?” I got the light bulb, screwed it back in, and it was working fine. But I’ve got no explanation for that.

JIM HAROLD: Huh.

RHEA: But I wasn’t scared, because I had my sister with me. It was just one of those things. And then another occasion, we had a blizzard. It was in Plymouth, and it’s quite rare to get snow. We get snow, but not like a massive amount where work stops or anything like that. But on this occasion we had a lot of snow, so we couldn’t get in to work, so we had a visit day. I had a couple friends that came over so we could sit and watch films and stuff.

I put my daughter to bed and then I went upstairs to go and use the toilet, and I noticed – at the top of the stairs we’ve got a loft, and it was a locked loft. You had to push it up and slide it. The loft was fully open. I thought maybe one of my friends was playing a trick on me, so I went down and asked them. They were like, “No.” And I’m too short to reach it, which is why I thought it was my friends. But no, they hadn’t touched it. My friend actually had to get a chair to go and shut the loft again.

Other things that happened, I would go away for a couple days and come back – do you know when you pull the curtains to close them at night or whatever? I would always close my curtains when I left home for a couple of days, but when I’d come home, I would pull up in my car and look at my window, and one of the curtains in particular would be drawn in but – do you know when you pull a curtain in, but it was drawn the opposite way. I never spoke about it to anyone because I thought “I’m not going to give it attention.” It was just one of those things that kept happening. Then I told my sister about it. I was like, “This odd thing keeps happening,” and she was like, “Maybe it’s the wind?” Trying to make me feel better.

But what really sent me over the edge to the point I was scared – a bit of context, my dog had a squeaky ball. She loved this ball, but it used to drive me absolutely nuts. I took her ball off her and put it on top of the fridge – it was quite high up – and completely forgot about it. A few weeks after, I’d just bathed my daughter. She was two at the time. I was getting her ready for bed, and I could hear this ball going off downstairs, the squeaky ball. I was like, “Oh, the dog’s found the ball.”

I continued getting my daughter dressed and the ball was still going off. I looked at the stairs through my door, and my dog was stood at the top of the stairs looking down the stairs as if to say “Oh, that’s my ball.” So I was really freaked out because there was no one down there. It was nighttime. I put my daughter in her cot and I sent the dog down the stairs first, because I thought “Someone’s got in the house and they’re messing with me,” or any rational explanation. I sent the dog down the stairs and she was running up and down, trying to find her ball.

The squeaking had stopped, so I went into my kitchen and I just stood there and I was like, “I am not imagining this.” I looked through into the dining room and the ball was on top of the dining room table, just in the middle of the table. Then I remembered I’d put it on top of the fridge weeks before. There’s no explanation for it. So I was really scared. One of my friends came over that night and I asked them to stay with me because I was so freaked out.

Then I spoke to my boss the next day at work, because it was to the point where I just wasn’t sleeping, and she suggested that I go and speak to the padre at work and talk to him. I was really worried because I thought, “He’s going to think I’m absolutely crazy.” I went and spoke to him, and he was really great and understanding, and he suggested that he would come to my house to bless the house.

So we arranged – it was a week after we spoke, and he would come with another padre to bless my house. So they did. They came in, met my daughter, and it was great. They walked in every room in the house and blessed the house, but in particular the dining room. Even he said, “It’s very heavy in here, isn’t it?” So yeah, they walked around, blessed the house, put some holy water on top of the doors.

It was really strange because that night, I felt at ease, and my daughter slept all through the night, and nothing really happened after that. I said to myself, “If anything was to happen, I would just say, ‘No thank you. I know you’re here, but no thank you.’” That’s the sort of thing I’d say. But nothing further happened from that experience apart from, as I was moving out of the house, the loft door – because after the first instance with the lock, I would always make sure it’s locked, and as I was moving out, I went up the stairs and I looked up there at the loft and it was open again. I was like, “There we go.” So I said out loud, “No thank you.”

But since then, nothing further has happened. We’ve moved out of the house now.

JIM HAROLD: So you think that cleansing may have helped the situation and cleared it out?

RHEA: I think so, yeah. I can’t explain the energy, how it felt. It just felt really heavy, especially in that particular room, and the odd things that happened. But nothing further.

JIM HAROLD: Well, it’s quite a story, and I’m glad that things are working out well for you now. Rhea, thank you so much for joining us all the way from the UK.

RHEA: Thank you, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: And thanks to Amy, too. Amy, stay spooky.

RHEA: Stay spooky!

JIM HAROLD: Next up on the Campfire is Sydney from Arkansas. Sydney listens with her son, Finn, so Finn, a spooky shoutout to you and stay spooky! And Sydney is going to tell us about a family trip when she was eight years old and the strangeness that ensued. Sydney, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us, and tell us what happened.

SYDNEY: Thank you for having me on. When I was about eight years old, we went to Eureka Springs. A lot of people have heard of the Crescent Hotel. This was back during dial-up internet, so we didn’t have phones on us with internet or anything like that. We would always go on sporadic trips, so we went with no real plan. We shopped all around all day long, and my mom kept asking, “Where should we go eat?” and everybody would say, “The Crescent Hotel.”

So we show up and they’re seating us, and I had to go to the bathroom. My dad was like, “Okay, we can see you from here. It’s no big deal.” So I go to the bathroom, walk in, go to a stall, and I sit down. I hear the door open but I never heard the odor shut, which I thought was a little weird. I go out of the stall, go to wash my hands, and I hear another stall door open, and up behind me walks a little girl. People talk about ghosts being translucent or gray-looking; she just looked like a little girl. I waved at her in the mirror and she didn’t do anything. She just looked at me, and then she kind of smiled. I was like, “My name’s Sydney. What’s your name?” No response. I was like, “Okay, that’s kind of weird.”

I dry my hands and I walk out of the bathroom and I’m walking back to the table, and my dad makes eye contact, and his face just falls. He looked white as a ghost, no pun intended. I walk back to the table and I’m like, “Are you okay?” I remember feeling very concerned because I’d never seen that look on my dad’s face before. He was like, “Was somebody in the bathroom with you?” I was like, “Actually, yeah, there was this little girl in there but she wouldn’t say anything.” He was like, “There was a little girl walking behind you, I blinked, and she was gone.”

It was just weird. I have goosebumps actually telling the story. Our waiter comes out and he even asked my dad, “Are you okay?” That’s how visibly shaken up my dad was. He tells the story and the waiter just starts dying laughing. He’s like, “You should go on the ghost tour later.” We’re like, “What are you talking about?” He was like, “Didn’t you know this place is haunted?” We were like, “What? No!” Funny enough, there’s a sign when you walk in about signing up for a ghost tour and we didn’t even see it. So that’s my story.

JIM HAROLD: It’s a good one. I think we’ve done shows before on the Crescent Hotel, so it’s not a surprise. And that’s really interesting when you said it just looked like a little girl. Very interesting indeed. Well, thanks so much. I appreciate it. Thank you for taking time to be on the show. I know you’ve got another story. We will catch that with you next time, and I appreciate it very much. Stay spooky! And thanks to Finn for listening too.

SYDNEY: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: Thank you for being here for another edition of the Campfire. If you’re new, I hope you’ll come back, and if you’ve been with us for a while or a long time, thank you so much. Wherever you are, I hope that you follow the podcast. That helps immensely. Please tell your friends. I would appreciate that very much. And finally, get a free book on me, a free eBook. Go over to jimharold.com and click on the orange button at the top of the page, and it’ll take you through the process to get a free Campfire eBook, some of our favorite Campfire stories ever, and it’s absolutely free. So check that out at jimharold.com.

I thank you so much. We’ll talk to you next time. Have a great week, everybody, and as always, stay safe 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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