We look back at some of our favorite Campfire stories of 2022!
Happy New Year!
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to our gathering tonight. Here we share stories of ordinary people who have experienced extraordinary things. Sit back, relax, and warm yourself by Jim Harold’s Campfire.
JIM HAROLD: Welcome to Jim Harold’s Campfire. So glad to be with you. Happy New Year, everybody, and I hope for those who celebrated, you had a fantastic Christmas. I know mine was a lot of fun. Just great memories.
Looking forward to 2023. It’s funny; I used to not look forward to the new year. I used to get depressed after the holiday season was over. But now I think with the business, and with doing the podcasts, I look at the new year as a way to look at how we did good things bringing you the content, how we can improve – and we definitely have some plans for 2023, not only with this show, but with all of our efforts. Some things will move around and change, but the good news is you’re here for Campfire; that is not going to change. [laughs] It has been proven over time that you guys love this show, and we’ll always try to get better, but Campfire is Campfire, still 90 minutes every week.
Looking back – and I think that’s appropriate, too. We look forward to 2023, but we look back, and every year I like to do a lookback to some of our favorite stories. We get so many stories; there are a few favorites that I missed out on and we weren’t able to include. But this is a great episode to share with a friend. This is what you can expect because this is the cream of the crop and they can really get a sense for the kind of stories that we bring forth each and every week with our great storytellers.
I will not belabor the point any longer. Happy New Year, everybody, and let’s get back to some of our favorite stories from 2022.
Marti is on the line, and she is going to tell us a story about an interesting trip down to New Orleans. She’s calling in today from Texas. She says that one of her favorite things to do, along with her son, is on road trips to listen to the Campfire. So Harrison, thank you for listening and stay spooky. And listen to Mom.
Marti, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us, and tell us about this trip to a wedding in New Orleans. It seemed to come with something a little bit extra.
MARTI: Yes, that’s right, Jim. Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure. This was back in 2012. My fiancé at the time, we were invited to a family wedding out in New Orleans. Jim, when I tell you this is a family wedding, this wasn’t just a wedding and the reception. It was a five-day-long vacation event.
JIM HAROLD: Sounds fun.
MARTI: We had all sorts of events planned. The first day would be in New Orleans. It would be a city tour and cocktail hour. So we went down there and I had tons of luggage, Jim. Tons of luggage. Five-day event, huge wedding, we’re going to be meeting everyone, so I wanted to look my best. I had two rolling luggage suitcases, duffle bags, a purse, a hat – it was a lot. You can picture me struggling through the airport, on the plane, just struggling everywhere with these suitcases.
We roll up to our hotel room, and I’m thinking it’s going to be your standard Double Tree, Holiday Inn Express. It’s absolutely not. It was an old mansion on St. Charles Avenue, right off the streetcar line. Are you familiar with St. Charles Avenue, Jim?
JIM HAROLD: I am not.
MARTI: It’s where all of the old money back in the day would build their mansions. It’s right on the Mississippi River. They’re just beautiful, lavish mansions lined with beautiful trees.
JIM HAROLD: It reminds me of In the Garden of Good and Evil, if you remember that book and movie.
MARTI: Yes, that’s very much what it’s like. This is actually a converted mansion to bed and breakfast. We walk up and it’s absolutely gorgeous. Big white pillars, columns holding up the structure. There’s people on the porch sipping their mint juleps, sipping their hurricanes. We feel like we’ve literally stepped back in time.
We walk in, beautiful mahogany walls, there’s stained glass windows, there’s a grand staircase that’s just gorgeous. We check in at reception, and the lady tells us that we’ll be staying on the third floor, and we can either take the stairs or the elevator. Since I had so much luggage in my hands, we thought it would be best to take the elevator.
We get into this elevator, and it’s not like a commercial elevator like we picture today. It’s basically a mesh box. It’s swinging and swaying back and forth. It’s tiny; it barely holds two people and their stuff. So we get in and we’re looking at each other like, “Is this safe?” We’re trying not to move too much, trying not to breathe too hard, for fear that we’ll be plummeting to our death. But we made it to the top.
We get to the top of the elevator, the door opens, and there’s a man at the top, waiting for us. He’s wearing a maroon three-piece suit, pillbox hat. There’s brass buttons on his suit.
JIM HAROLD: Oh my, like an old school bellboy.
MARTI: Correct. You got it. He opens the mesh gate, pulls it back for us. My fiancé walks out. I’m struggling with all of my luggage, and the wheels are spinning, my hat’s over my head, my purse is falling off. It’s, again, a mess. I laugh and I’m giggling to myself, and I’m almost embarrassed. The man was very, very sweet; he kept holding the door for me, smiling and laughing with me.
I finally get all of my stuff together, I step off the elevator, and I say, “Thank you, sir. Thank you so much for holding that door. I hope you have a great day.” It’s at that moment where my fiancé turns to me and says, “Who are you talking to?” I said, “That bellboy. That elevator attendant.” We turn back – no one was there, Jim.
JIM HAROLD: Oh man. Not just a ghost, but an extremely well-dressed one.
MARTI: Well-dressed, and I interacted with him. I literally spoke words to him and thanked him for holding the door for me. He was that clear as day.
JIM HAROLD: The phantom bellboy.
MARTI: Yes. Needless to say, we were completely freaked out. I don’t know if he was more scared of the ghost or the fact that I saw it and he couldn’t. Either way, we dropped off our stuff and went straight to Bourbon Street to shake that one off, if you know what I mean.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, have a little liquid courage.
MARTI: Yes, exactly. That’s the story. It was so quick, but it’s a good one. It’s stuck with me ever since.
JIM HAROLD: I’ll tell you something, that would stick with me as well. Wow. That is just – oh my gosh. The phantom bellboy. I love that. That’s like a Campfire classic.
MARTI: Thank you. Honestly, you hear these stories and I’m like, I wonder if this one’s any good. But yeah, I think what makes it a little bit more magical, too, is the fact that it is in New Orleans and the fact that this place is so old and has so much history. It just makes sense.
JIM HAROLD: Before we go, I have a couple of questions.
MARTI: Sure thing.
JIM HAROLD: How old would you estimate the bellboy was?
MARTI: He was definitely older. If I had to guesstimate, maybe 60-65?
JIM HAROLD: I guess my question would be, what do you think he was? You interacted with him, so it couldn’t have been just a replay. You think this ghost was sentient and obviously knew what was going on, kind of thing?
MARTI: I believe so. I took a deep dive into Google after this and actually found some information. I’m not sure if you’d like to hear that.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, go ahead. Give us a little info.
MARTI: The first thing that comes up when you pop this hotel into search is the name of the hotel and then “haunted.” So I clicked on that, and apparently there’s three ghosts that people see often. One is a “well-dressed gentleman” – this is a quote from the website – either in the lobby or at the door of their rooms, playing host. Visitors have even claimed to have spoken with him. He’ll often ask if guests need anything to make their stay more memorable. When they tell him no, his job is done and he disappears.
JIM HAROLD: Actually him just being there makes it more memorable. [laughs]
MARTI: Yes. [laughs] So apparently this isn’t just me. There’s an entire website about this place, and the best part is I knew nothing about this hotel. I went in blind.
JIM HAROLD: How has it changed, or has it changed, your perception of the paranormal, of the supernatural? Or has it?
MARTI: I come from a family of people that see things. I’ve seen many things; this is just one of them. So it really didn’t change anything, but it feels good to know that – like a little nudge, like, “Yeah, we’re still here.” There’s still people around even when you don’t see them on a daily basis, for example.
JIM HAROLD: Wow. That’s really something else. Well, Marti, fantastic story. Thank you, and also, of course, thanks, Harrison, for listening. We appreciate that, Harrison. Thanks for being a part of the Campfire.
MARTI: Thank you for having me, Jim.
Sue is on the line from Vermont, and I’ve got to tell you, I read this story and it’s like, “Oh, I hope Sue shows up for this call” because I love these kinds of stories. It’s an ultimate headscratcher. Sue, welcome to the show and tell us what happened.
SUE: Hi. Thank you. This takes place back in the ’80s, so before cellphones. I was recently graduated from college. I was still living at home with my mother and my sister, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do with myself, so I decided to take a college class about an hour away from us in the university town of Burlington. It was an evening class.
It’s in November, so it’s cold and it’s dark, and I’m coming home on the interstate, and my car decides to start acting funny. So I pull over to the shoulder and it completely dies on me. Now, to explain the interstate, it’s a pretty straight shot from my house to there, about an hour. Below, down an embankment, is another road that runs parallel to it. You can see it intermittently along the interstate, but you can’t really get to it because there’s a lot of boulders or trees or there’s even a river that goes along.
Where I happened to pull over is one of the only places where you can actually access the other road. So that was kind of weird. I could see lights down below there, and I thought, “I am not sitting on the interstate in the dark, waiting for a possible good Samaritan to stop. I’m going to have to explore where these lights are. Hopefully it’s a house and I can have them help me or I can use their phone.”
JIM HAROLD: You were going to take the bull by the horns and solve the problem yourself.
SUE: Yeah, I’m not a trusting person by nature. I get very suspicious of people and always look for an exit plan. So I was like, “I’m going to do this. I’m not waiting for somebody.”
JIM HAROLD: That’s pretty smart. I think you’re smart.
SUE: But it’s, like I said, cold, dark. No flashlight. I’m wearing a skirt and dress shoes. I climb over the guardrail and I hike down this hill – there’s a lot of scrub brush and rocks – thinking I’m going to get to somebody’s house. I actually end up in the parking lot of a gas station garage, and I’m like, “Wow, I’m really lucky here.”
I go in. There’s a young man – I remember it being a young man behind the counter. I’ve got my hazard lights on. I say, “You can see my car from here. I’m stalled up there. Can you help me?” There was a clock on the wall behind him. He points to the clock and says, “We close at 8:00,” and it’s like five minutes to 8:00. I’m thinking, okay, what does that mean? Then he says, “But the owner lives next door, and maybe he’ll help you.”
It’s a long time ago, so I could be fuzzy on some details, but I don’t remember him ever calling anybody. But suddenly there’s this other man there, and he was probably – if I was to describe him, he would be in his forties, early fifties. He was in a mechanic’s outfit, and he said, “What can I do?” I told him, “My car is up there.” He says, “Okay, let’s get in my tow truck and go up and see.”
Now, again, I’m a very suspicious person, but I had no problem getting in the truck with this guy. I was like, “Okay.” He takes me up through this access road back onto the thing. He takes a look at the car and he says, “I can’t fix it tonight. Do you have a garage that we can tow it to?” I said, “Yeah, but it’s like 40 miles south.” He says, “That’s okay. We can do that.” He hooks up the car and he tows me to my garage.
All the while, I’m thinking how calm I feel, and comfortable. Like, here’s a stranger that is taking me on the road, and I didn’t have any doubts or suspicions about this person at all. I was just very calm. He was very fatherly.
JIM HAROLD: A very kind person, a very kind soul.
SUE: Yeah, very kind. Very calming person. Asked me about my life and that kind of stuff, but very calming. So he droves me 40 miles to the garage. We get to the garage, and you know how they have the drop box place where you can put the keys in and stuff? They usually have papers. So he tells me – he wasn’t mansplaining or anything. [laughs] He was guiding me what to tell them. He says, “You want to write this down, and you want to tell them this is wrong with your car” and all that stuff, “and then you’re going to do this.” I did exactly what he said.
He goes, “Okay, now we’ve got to get you home.” I’m like, “Oh yeah, that’s another 20 minutes.” He’s like, “Okay, that’s fine.” And he drives me to my door and we get there and I said, “How do I pay you? I only have a couple bucks in my purse. I have my checkbook.” He says, “Oh, okay, how about $20?” Even in the ’80s, $20 for all that was pretty cheap.
JIM HAROLD: Wasn’t much.
SUE: Yeah, wasn’t much. So I wrote out a check and gave it to him, and I remember him very clearly saying, “Now you go inside and you tell your family that everything’s okay. You tell them everything that happened. You tell them all about this and let them know that everything is fine. Everything is okay.” I remember him saying that repeatedly, and I was like, “Okay, I’ll do that.” And he left. I went in, told my family.
The next day, my mother and my sister and I were planning a shopping trip up in Burlington, so we were going the same road, and I said, “I’m going to take you by that place. This guy was so nice. You’ve got to see where this was.”
The place was boarded up. Even writing on the boards, like it had been vandalized. Boarded up like it’d been closed for years and years and years. Like abandoned. I was like, it’s less than 24 hours that I was here. This is too weird. I went, “You’ve got to be kidding me. This is the place.” My family was going, “Are you sure? Maybe you got the wrong place.” I’m like, “There is no other garage on this road unless you get into a town.” They’re like, “Uh-huh…”
It really freaked me out. To this day, I can’t explain it. It was just completely abandoned.
JIM HAROLD: Did the truck that he was driving, that you were riding in, or the station, did they look particularly out of date?
SUE: I couldn’t tell you. One, I don’t remember. It’s quite a while ago. But also, I’m not good at cars and stuff. [laughs] But they didn’t look like they were from the ’40s, that’s for sure. But it was just very strange. The three things that always got me about it was how calming he was and how comfortable I felt and then the fact that it was totally abandoned, but also that it happened to be exactly that spot. I have traveled that road many times, and between my house and Burlington, that is the only place where you can actually access the other road.
JIM HAROLD: It seems like there’s a couple of different possibilities here. One is that maybe this person and this place obviously at one time existed, and they came back just to help you. Somebody sent them back just to help you. Maybe it’s the ghost of the person. Maybe it was some kind of weird time slip, or some kind of alternate reality. Do you have a favorite amongst those?
SUE: It’s odd because I’ve had a few things that have happened in my life where I happened to be at a really weird place, and I always said my guardian angel worked overtime to save me from different things. When I would tell the story to people, I’d always say either it was my guardian angel or, because of the calming sensation that I had, it might’ve been my dad because my dad died when I was 15, and I always thought that he was around me. So I had that kind of thought, only because of that fatherly, calming way about him. But I don’t know.
JIM HAROLD: That’s such a great story.
SUE: Somebody was sent to help me.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, I think so. Well, Sue, just a tremendous story. A Campfire classic indeed, and I thank you for sharing it today.
SUE: Thank you so much.
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Merry Christmas and happy holidays from the Spooky Studio! Now, back to Jim Harold’s Campfire.
JIM HAROLD: James is back on the Campfire. So glad to have him from North Yorkshire, England. So good to talk to him again. He’s also a podcaster with his Fortean News podcast, so check that out. He told us a remarkable story last time about his grandparents in the Second World War, and today he’s going to go in the past, but not quite so far. This one’s from the 1970s. Always interested in the ’70s. Fascinating decade. So good to have James back. Please tell us that groovy story from the 1970s. Thank you for joining us again.
JAMES: Thank you, Jim. Thank you so much for having me. This is my uncle down in Coventry, which is in the Midlands. He was out one night with some friends – I think they’d been to the theatre or something, or the cinema. They were driving back at night and came in quite late. My grandparents were both in bed. But when he came home, my granddad came out to see my uncle because he heard him wailing. He was crying. Asked him what was wrong.
My uncle explained that they were just driving along, they came to this roundabout, a junction in the road, and there were no other cars coming, so they just carried straight over. But they heard and saw a little girl appearing in the road, and they hit this little girl. The entire car – there were five people in the car – every single one of them saw this girl, every single one of them heard the bump when they hit her. They got out of the car, they looked everywhere, but just couldn’t find this little girl. So that was a mystery alone.
They didn’t know what to do. This was before mobile phones, so they dropped my uncle off. He was the first one on the route. He was just in a panic. He was in a real state. My granddad was just trying to calm him down and he said, “We’ve got to call the police. We’ve got to let them know and get her help if she’s still out there.”
So he rang the police, and this was the time when you rang the police and it went to your local office rather than ringing a center. It just went straight to the local Coventry police station. They explained what happened, and the police officer said, “Was it by this junction, on this road? There’s a hole in the fence. Was it there?” My granddad said, “Yeah, that’s exactly right. Have you found her?” Quite pleased that he knew what area it was.
And the police officer responded with, “Don’t worry. Just try to stay calm. This happens all the time. A little girl died there a couple of years ago, and this keeps occurring and we keep getting calls. Obviously, we’ll send someone out there, but try not to worry. It’s probably nothing>”
JIM HAROLD: Wow.
JAMES: Which of course just blew – again, my granddad was a nonbeliever, didn’t really believe in ghosts. Couldn’t give me an explanation for this, but it just left him absolutely dumbfounded.
JIM HAROLD: Police tend to be – I think just because of their job, they might be a little more jaded than the average person and not given to flights of fancy. The fact they say, “There’s a ghost child, basically, and this happens all the time” – that’s pretty good validation.
JAMES: Yeah. Obviously, if they don’t investigate seriously and someone has been hit there, their jobs and possibly criminal prosecution themselves – so to actually say that is insane, isn’t it?
JIM HAROLD: That is amazing. James, thank you once again for another great story. I appreciate it, and thanks for being a part of the Campfire.
JAMES: Thank you, Jim.
JIM HAROLD: Heidi is on the line from Oregon, and she has a childhood story, and I’ve never heard this particular story before. I think it’s fascinating. It’s about Jack, and I’ll let her tell you the rest of the story. Heidi, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us, and tell us what happened.
HEIDI: Thanks for having me. My experience happened in Sacramento, California, where I grew up. I was really young during this experience. I was actually still sleeping in a crib and it was before I could walk and talk, but I do remember a lot from my early childhood, so this is just another memory that stands out a lot to me, and I still randomly think of it.
I woke up in my crib to a black-and-white cat sitting in my crib. And it wasn’t a photoreal cat; it was almost like someone wearing a mascot costume or the cat version of the Donnie Darko bunny. It was adult-sized and almost taking up so much space that his knees were cramped against the side of the crib.
I was so terrified. I specifically remember it was negative energy. I remember my thought process. I was trying to crawl over the railing of the crib. But looking back on it, I think he was talking telepathically to me. He was saying, “Your parents” – this is really demonic, but “Your parents aren’t going to hear your crying. You’re not going to be able to leave your room. You won’t make it over your crib.”
I was telling my parents this story randomly when I was visiting them a few months ago, and my mom’s face was shocked. She was like, “I would walk into your room a lot of the time when you were that age and your brother would be sleeping under your crib.” My brother was around three at that time. He told her that he was protecting me from Jack the Cat.
JIM HAROLD: Whoa.
HEIDI: My mom also would always sing us “Hit the Road, Jack” by Ray Charles as a lullaby, and I never made that connection or that my brother had ever seen the cat or that its name was Jack. It was such a weird conversation. Then we called my brother, and my dad was really creeped out because he doesn’t believe in the paranormal. But all three of us remember. So that’s my story.
JIM HAROLD: Wow. What do you think Jack the Cat was?
HEIDI: From past episodes I’ve listened to, it almost seems like the callers who say it’s something pretending to be a cat. It’s presenting itself – because it wasn’t a real-looking cat. There was definitely something weird about it and just really dark energy. I’m not sure.
JIM HAROLD: I just think of the smiling face of a Cheshire Cat. That’s what’s coming to mind as you say that. Again, we love our pets, but it’s kind of like the idea of Black-Eyed Kids. There’s nothing more innocent than a kid, but the Black-Eyed Kid phenomena can turn that on its head and make it seem very sinister. Same way with a household pet. We love our pets. Many people out there, cat people, they love their cats. I’m a dog person, love dogs. But when that kind feeling is replaced by something more sinister, that even amps it up more and makes it more scary.
HEIDI: Definitely. And it is weird because I’m a huge cat person. I just don’t correlate that memory to actually being a cat, so it doesn’t – I mean, it was a cat visually, but definitely a different feeling than a household pet.
JIM HAROLD: That is frightening. Well, Heidi, thank you for giving me nightmares for the next three months. [laughs]
HEIDI: No problem. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: Jack the Cat, oh no. Thank you so much for being a part of the Campfire and listening for all these years.
HEIDI: Thank you.
JIM HAROLD: Now on the Campfire we have a special storyteller, Reverend Gerald Hunter. He’s been on the show before, and he’s also an author. He’s going to tell us about that. He has a story going back from his college days. He’s calling us today from Michigan, and we’re so glad to have him. Reverend Hunter, welcome back to the program. I know you always have such great stories, so I can’t wait to hear this one.
REV. GERALD HUNTER: Thank you for having me. The story does go back to my days when I was at Albian College. I was preparing for seminary, but first I had to finish my bachelor’s degree. I had a family to support as well, so I took employment on a midnight shift at the Calhoun County Juvenile Detention Facility. Locked up in there were an average of about 50 teenagers, about 95% of them male. There were four wings for the residents there. Every child, every teenager had their own individual room to sleep in at night.
I worked with two others on the midnight shift. My immediate supervisor was about my age; his name was Ron. He was a big guy who was still in the military reserve. And a woman named Laura, who took care of the female wing, and Ron and I took care of the three male wings. When we would arrive for work, all of the teens would be locked down in their individual rooms already for the night. So what we would do is Ron and I would do the janitorial work, which only took about an hour and a half, and then the female staff member took care of the things that she needed to take care of.
Then we would sit in the office area and monitor the individual rooms by means of an audio piece of equipment that would scan every 10 seconds from one room to the next. Just so that we make sure we could hear in there that the kids were sleeping all right, no one’s wrestling around or coughing or getting sick or having a bad night, whatever the case might be.
On this one particular night, everything was calm and quiet as usual. We’d finished our chores; we were sitting in the office area, listening to the monitor and just talking and chilling out, waiting for our shift to end. It must’ve been about 1:30 in the morning or so. The monitor was going every 10 seconds to a different room, and then suddenly it went to one room, and we could hear the male resident – he was about 15 years old – talking.
He was talking as though he was speaking to someone else in there with him, which was totally impossible. The place was completely locked down. We’d do room checks every 30 minutes with flashlights to make sure all was well. But we knew he wasn’t talking in his sleep because you can almost tell when somebody’s doing that and the difference in the tone of voice they have.
So we flipped the switch so we could stay tuned in to just his room, and sure enough, he was talking – and at one point he asked a question, and he got an answer. The answer he got was in the form of the voice of a very old man. This place was locked up tighter than a drum, tighter than a wine bottle at a Protestant funeral service. [laughs] There’s no way anybody could get in and out. We had that kind of security.
So we sat there listening, and he would say something and this old man would answer him and ask him questions, and they’d go back and forth. After about 30-40 seconds of that, Ron looked at me and said, “We’d better check that out.” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Okay, let me know what you see.” I said, “You want me to go there by myself?” He said, “Well, yeah.” Now, Ron was not afraid of anything, but he was afraid to go down there.
Finally I said, “Let’s both go.” He said okay, we grabbed our flashlights and walked down there. Each door had a small window in it. We stood next to the window where nobody in that room could see us and listened, and sure enough, the conversation was going on. It was the young man talking about things that he had done, and the old man’s voice reassuring him that it was all right, he was justified to do it, “don’t worry about it, you’ll get out of here and then you can be back” – these kinds of things.
Eventually, that was enough. We got the courage and shined our light in there, and the young man was all alone. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, oblivious to our lights, and staring toward the wall across from him. He would speak again, and then he would answer himself – you could see his mouth move and everything; it was coming from him – in the old, old man’s crackling voice.
Right away I’m thinking, okay, we’ve got some psychological thing going on.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, it would seem to be a multiple personality disorder. I’ve heard of that sort of thing.
REV. GERALD HUNTER: Something was going on there. It gets a little better. We watched him, and he would say something in his voice and then it would come out as the answer in an old man’s voice, and then both voices at the same time started coming out of him.
JIM HAROLD: Oh boy.
REV. GERALD HUNTER: We were just absolutely dumbfounded. We were staring through the window and looking at this and thinking, what in the world is going on? We looked at each other and I whispered to Ron, “Are we going in there? Is this kid all right?” Ron says, “I don’t know. Should we unlock the door or just watch him for a while?”
The conversation continued between the young voice and the old voice, but again there were times when both voices – it’s like if I were speaking to you right now and you started speaking to me, only I didn’t shut up and I kept talking over you. It’s like both voices at once would come in.
JIM HAROLD: Oh my gosh.
REV. GERALD HUNTER: It was the strangest feeling you got. It just made you feel you fill with dread, standing there in this pitch-dark hallway. You don’t want to disturb the other kids in their rooms nearby, but you’re witnessing something that you think nobody is going to believe you.
We finally unlocked the door. The kid stopped talking. It came to a complete stop. Ron gently shook him, and he just simply looked up and he said something like, “What are you guys doing in here?” Then we told him he was talking in his sleep, did he remember any of it, and he said no. He lay back down in bed. We locked the door, watched him for a while, and he fell back asleep.
The problem that created was every time we entered one of the young people’s rooms, we had to document why we did it in a logbook that the supervisors would look at every morning. We didn’t know what to write. How do you write something like that and still expect to keep your job? People would think we were crazy or whatever. So we were really back and forth about, “Do we write this or don’t we?” We knew we had to write something about it because if one of the other kids did hear anything, he would talk about it and we’d have to answer for that.
Ron finally looked at me and said, “Well, you’re the college kid. You figure out something to write.” All I did was I wrote in the logbook something like, “So-and-so,” and I gave the kid’s name, “had a sleepless night last night, and perhaps one of the morning counselors should ask him how he’s feeling.” That was the best I was going to do. I wasn’t about to tell the supervisor. I needed the job, and I wasn’t about to tell the supervisor, “We had a paranormal experience, this kid was talking in two different voices at the same time and carrying on.” Nobody would believe you. Ron and I really didn’t want anybody else to know because we didn’t want to be made fun of. We thought that would probably happen.
JIM HAROLD: There’s a coda to this, though, isn’t there?
REV. GERALD HUNTER: Well, yeah. There is a coda. There’s probably a couple of codas. What was the one I told you?
JIM HAROLD: About the young lady who came in.
REV. GERALD HUNTER: Oh, yes. The young woman that was in charge of the women’s hallway had been down there during all of this because that’s where the washing and drying machines were. It was up to her to take care of all the laundry for all of the kids on her shift. When we were done with our little experience and back in the office, looking at each other and talking about this, we saw her coming towards the office area. About that time of night she always took a break anyway, so we decided we weren’t going to say anything to her.
She came in and she sat down next to us and made a little small talk and she said, “I just had the strangest thing happen.” I’m thinking to myself, lady, you don’t know what strange is. [laughs] But we said, “What happened? What’s strange?” She said, “I was folding clothes. The washer and dryer weren’t running because I’d dried a batch, I was folding them and putting them away, and I could hear one of the girls down the hallway, locked up in her own room, and she was talking to somebody. I stood there and listened and I could hear her say something, and then I could hear an older woman say something.”
She said, “It went back and forth, and I just figured this is not possible. Who got in here? Did one of the employees stay over and they’re counseling a kid in there and they didn’t tell us? What’s happening?” So she went down to the room to look, and she said that child, that girl was sitting on the edge of the bed doing the same thing, essentially – carrying on a conversation with somebody that wasn’t there. She said the two voices were coming from that girl, but she never saw the girl speak in two voices at the same time.
She said, “That’s when I decided to come here and sit down with you guys, ask you if you ever experienced anything like this, and if you would go back down into the ladies’ wing with me to help me check out all of the rooms and make sure the girls are okay.” We told her, “Number one, yeah, we experienced it. Here’s what just happened to us. Number two, we’d love to go down there and help you out, but we’re not permitted on that wing unless there’s a fight. So you’re on your own. Next time you do a room check, if you have a problem, you can yell and we can come. But just to come down to do a bed check, we’re not allowed to do that.”
JIM HAROLD: Right, understandable.
REV. GERALD HUNTER: Then the three of us agreed that she would basically write in her logbook pretty much the same thing I wrote in ours, and that we would keep this to ourselves unless it happened again in the future, and then we would share it with the administration.
That was enough to make every one-half-hour walkthrough with my flashlight down those three hallways a really scary event for the rest of the time I ever worked there, because I was just hoping nothing like that would ever happen again.
JIM HAROLD: I would be interested in your perspective as a reverend, now that you have decades of hindsight and all of your studies and so forth. First of all, I want to make the point – and I’m sure you would agree – that there are mental illnesses that can cause people to talk to themselves in other voices. Multiple personality disorder and so forth. We don’t want to discount those.
But in a case where someone is talking in both voices at the same time, I don’t even know if that’s physically possible under normal circumstances. So my question to you, as a man of the cloth: do you think this was some kind of maybe evil entity or something that was visiting the different cells, trying to find maybe kids who were more susceptible to their discussions and maybe manifesting itself?
REV. GERALD HUNTER: I think there was something that was trying to lead this young man into believing that his behavior before he got locked up was justified and he could keep on doing it when he got out.
There have only been two times in my over 40 years of investigating paranormal events where I have to admit to myself that the possibility of some kind of possession is there, and this was one of those times. Why it would have shown up on the boys’ wing and the girls’ wing pretty much at the same time, once in an old man’s voice, once in an old woman’s voice, makes me think even more that there was some spiritual kind of thing going on in there that wasn’t positive in the spiritual sense. I’m being very careful not to say demonic or anything, even though I know that I don’t have a basis to deny that.
JIM HAROLD: Very, very interesting indeed. Now, Reverend Hunter has a lot of spooky stories and a lot of haunted information on Michigan, for example, and I know you have multiple books. So Reverend Hunter, can you briefly tell people where they can find your books?
REV. GERALD HUNTER: They can find my books – Haunted Michigan is the first one. The second one is More Haunted Michigan. The third one is Haunted Michigan: The Haunting Continues, and I’m working on the fourth one right now. I’m finished with everything but the editing. So Book #4 will be coming out soon, including a lot of interesting places in Ohio that really shook my psychic tree in the past couple of months. You can get those on Amazon, you can get those at any bookstore that can order them for you, or you can contact Thunder Bay Press in Michigan.
And if you’d like to contact me, you can email them and they can forward an email back to me, and I’ll be glad to chitchat with you, or if you have suggestions of haunted places, that’d be great too. I could follow up on those.
JIM HAROLD: Well, Reverend, it’s always a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you for sharing this amazing story on the Campfire.
REV. GERALD HUNTER: I’ll be back for more if you let me.
JIM HAROLD: Absolutely. Open invitation.
REV. GERALD HUNTER: Thank you, Jim.
JIM HAROLD: Jim Harold’s Campfire is brought to you by the Ancient Mysteries Cruise and Holidaymaker Travel. I’m so excited to be going on the Ancient Mysteries Cruise #6, New York to Bermuda, coming up March 28th to April 2nd, 2023. I’ll be there; Nick Pope, UFO expert extraordinaire; Nick Redfern, author extraordinaire; Peter Robbins, also extraordinaire UFO expert and author; Micah Hanks, good buddy who is extraordinaire in his own way; and then the extraordinaire Dar Harold, and she’s with us right now.
DAR HAROLD: Oh, no, no. Thank you so much. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: But you’re going to be there.
DAR HAROLD: I am. I’m so excited to go.
JIM HAROLD: Not only, Dar, are we going to get to interface with all these great minds – and on these cruises, you really do get to meet the speakers and things. It’s a little bit different than what you would expect. You really are having dinner with them and really interfacing with them.
DAR HAROLD: Right. I was going to say, it’s quite interactive. You get to have dinner, you get to go on excursions with you guys. The best one is a night cruise to the Bermuda Triangle. Come on, people, that’s going to be fantastic. I can’t wait.
JIM HAROLD: It’s going to be fantastic. The other thing that I understand – and you know I love a good meal – you were telling me about the meal halls.
DAR HAROLD: Oh my goodness. This ship is quite different because it’s not just like you have your traditional dining or you have your buffet. You have something they’re calling the Indulge Food Hall, and it’s very much almost like a food court, but they have little screens and you can order different entrees, different kinds of food from each little place. They have Indian and they have Italian and they have healthy salads and desserts.
JIM HAROLD: I’ll be sure to stay away from those.
DAR HAROLD: Yeah, you probably will. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: Now, Dar, for the latest deals, what our listeners need to do is go to ancientaliencruise.com to get the most updated information, and I would highly recommend you go as soon as you hear that to get the best deals available at this time. So ancientaliencruise.com is the place to go.
Yeah, we would love to have you on the cruise with us, and we’ll have a good time.
DAR HAROLD: Yeah, it would be so much fun.
JIM HAROLD: On this brand-new ship. I was blown away. I’ve seen a lot of ships and I was watching the videos on YouTube and I’m like, okay, now there’s cruise ships and then there’s a cruise ship, and this is definitely a cruise ship. This is something else.
DAR HAROLD: Right, a three-level go-kart racing course.
JIM HAROLD: Dry slides that you can race on. Maybe we’ll race.
DAR HAROLD: Yes!
JIM HAROLD: Maybe. I’m not promising.
DAR HAROLD: No, you’re not promising? Because you know I’ll win, that’s why.
JIM HAROLD: That could be. But I’m promising you, you’ll have a great time if you go on Ancient Mysteries Cruise #6, New York to Bermuda, March 28th to April 2nd, 2023. Go to ancientaliencruise.com. Ancientaliencruise.com. And Dar, we hope to see them on board.
DAR HAROLD: Absolutely. Hope to see you guys there.
Follow Jim on Twitter and Instagram @TheJimHarold and join our Virtual Campfire Facebook group at VirtualCampfireGroup.com. Now, back to the Campfire.
JIM HAROLD: Rachel is on the line from Indiana. We’re so glad to have her on the show, and she has one of my favorite kinds of stories. Hold on to your seatbelts – it’s a Ouija board story. Rachel, welcome to the show. Please tell us what happened.
RACHEL: Well, it happened in the late ’80s, and I was probably around 12. My parents that Christmas for some reason had gotten me a Ouija board. I guess they were a big seller, I don’t know. But I had this Ouija board and I decided to take it with me to my cousins’ house when we went to visit.
They lived in a small town in the Upper Peninsula where we all grew up, and they lived in a house that was on the property with another house. I don’t know if the house they lived in was owned by the man that lived in the other house, but they were close together and my cousins’ family had been really close to the man who lived next door. I had never met him, and I don’t remember his name, but I’ll just call him Bill.
We are in my cousin’s bedroom, and there were four of us. It was me and my younger sister and my two cousins. My cousins were probably 14 and 15 at the time, so just a little older. We have the Ouija board out and we’re asking it little simple questions, and it’s moving along. You never know if it’s actually moving or if someone in the room is forcing it.
We’re holding on to the planchette, and my cousins asked a question. They said, “Can we see Bill?” Of course, Bill had died a few weeks earlier, so they had wanted to communicate with him somehow. It said, “Yes.” So we were just waiting around, like, “How is that possible? Maybe he’s going to give a message or something like that.”
As we’re watching, the planchette moves across the board and it goes to “M…I…R…R…O…R.” We just looked at each other because it spelled out “mirror,” and we’re like, okay.
JIM HAROLD: You’re giving me chills, Rachel, you’re giving me chills! Ooh.
RACHEL: I know. When I think back on it now, it still gives me the chills. We looked around her bedroom, and she had a dresser with a big mirror on the top of it. We were like, “Well, I guess we’ll have to look in the mirror. Maybe some writing will appear or something.” We had no idea. As we’re sitting there, gazing into the mirror, my vision started – you know how when you look at the sun or something bright hits you in the eye and you get that hazy vision?
JIM HAROLD: Yeah.
RACHEL: It was kind of like that in the mirror. I’m looking at it like, what’s happening? As I was looking at it, I saw the outline and the form of a man in the mirror.
JIM HAROLD: Oh man. Oh man, oh man, oh man. You’re giving me chills again, Rachel! Oh man.
RACHEL: I know. I can still see him. I described this man, what he looked like, the hair on his head, the glasses he had on, the body type, even down to his flannel shirt. That’s all I could really tell. Once it got past the waist, I really couldn’t see. But it was this man, and he was just standing there. It never got into a clear mirror image, but it kind of looked like the negative to a photo.
I’m describing what I’m seeing and I was thinking to myself, “This is crazy. Maybe I just want to see something, so that’s what I’m seeing.” I’m describing this man, and then it faded away, and then my cousins were like, “You know what, we don’t want to do this anymore. This is dumb.” I was like, “Okay.” I felt bad, then. I thought maybe I had seen something just because I wanted to and I described it, and then they thought I was making it up.
So we put the board away and continued doing other things together. A little while later, my cousin came out of the bathroom and she had been crying in there. I asked her if something was wrong or what happened, and she got really upset and told me it wasn’t fair that I got to see Bill and she didn’t. Because I described him exactly how he looked, down to the type of glasses he had and everything. And I had never met him before.
JIM HAROLD: Wow.
RACHEL: Yeah.
JIM HAROLD: Wow. The fact that you could describe him, that’s affirmation it wasn’t just your imagination. Wow.
RACHEL: Right, and that’s when I got chills after that. I was like, “I’m glad that I wasn’t making something up to upset you, but oh my gosh, I just saw a dead man in the mirror.”
JIM HAROLD: Ooh, man. [laughs] Campfire classic, Rachel. That is a Campfire classic. I love it. What a great story. Now, did you ever think that maybe – and I don’t know if this has been borne out throughout your life – do you think you saw him because you’re more psychically in tune, you’re more open to these things?
RACHEL: I feel like it’s possible because every place that I’ve lived, there’s been some kind of activity. That was basically my first experience with anything like that, but maybe that experience opened me up to being more open-minded about everything. Because even before I saw that, I was open to it. But that was my first experience with anything. I’ve not seen anything since then, but I’m very aware that things have happened every place that I’ve lived.
JIM HAROLD: Very cool indeed, Rachel. Thank you so much for sharing this story. I’m so excited to share it with the audience. Thanks for being on the Campfire today.
RACHEL: Thank you.
JIM HAROLD: Stephen is on the line from County Down in Northern Ireland. We love to hear from our international callers. It’s fantastic. I love the fact that we have this worldwide electronic Campfire. But it’s only possible because of Stephen and people like him, people who call in with their stories. Stephen, you have a remarkable story that you sent along to me. Could you please share it?
STEPHEN: I’ll give you the backdrop. Living here in Belfast in Northern Ireland, it was during the time of the Sectarian Conflict, which people would know as the Troubles. Belfast City Centre was a very dangerous place for anybody to be in, whether you were from the Protestant or Catholic communities.
My friend and I were both 14-year-old Protestant kids. We were involved in the punk scene in Belfast, and it was New Year’s Eve 1980. One of the local bands were playing in the Pine Club in Belfast City Centre. It was a good distance from where we lived. We went along and had a great evening. Everybody was enjoying themselves. Because we were 14, our parents had made it clear to us that we had to be home by midnight, and to do that we needed to get the last bus leaving the City Centre, which was about 11 o’clock.
Because we were involved in punk, it was a big thing in Belfast for us at the time, and we were incredibly proud of it. We were the generation who broke the mold. We stopped out of the Sectarian Conflict. We mixed with Protestant/Catholic kids, middle class kids, working class kids, gay kids. Right up until 1983, it was illegal to be gay in Northern Ireland. It was a life sentence.
JIM HAROLD: Oh my.
STEPHEN: It was incredible, it was horrible. But we threw that back in their faces and we got on with it and did our own thing. It was a big thing for us. When you’re that age, it’s very exciting.
So we’re well into the evening and we’re enjoying ourselves, and my friend Terry came running up to me. He screamed in my ear – I was with my girlfriend at the time, Maria Kelly, a young Catholic girl from the other side of Belfast. He screamed, “Steve-o, we’ve got to go. It’s a quarter to eleven. We’ve got to go.” So we ran out of the club onto Oxford Street where the bus stop was. Just as we turned onto Oxford Street, we saw the bus pulling away from the stop. We’d missed it. That was the last bus. We had no money. We couldn’t have got a cab home.
We were really frightened at that point, like, “Oh God, what are we going to do? We’re stuck here.” We had to make the decision that we were going to walk home. To get home, we would’ve had to go through two Catholic ghettos. Very, very dangerous for young Protestants. To be fair, for a young Catholic to walk through a Protestant ghetto would’ve been equally as dangerous. People in the United States and other parts of the world listening to this might think it’s ridiculous, but it really was a matter of life and death.
JIM HAROLD: I remember when I was young, you would hear so much about the violence in Northern Ireland. So much.
STEPHEN: We were living and breathing it. We were 14; we had no real concept of how dangerous it was really, but we knew it was bad. But all of a sudden, it was in our face that we weren’t traveling in our dad’s car, or we weren’t traveling in a bus going through these areas. We were going to have to walk. It was quite different.
So we decided to go to the Lagan backroad. Lagan backroad was a small road along the edge of the River Lagan, which runs right through the city. It goes to the east region, which would take us towards where we needed to go. Going that way, we only had to go through one Catholic ghetto, which is called the Short Strand. It’s just on the corner of the Lagan backroad, at the opposite side of the Albert Bridge.
We decided to go along that way. We got down there, full of bravado. “We’re going to be okay, there’ll be nobody there. We’ll get through it all right. It’ll be fine, it’ll be okay.” Just as we came down to the bridge, we could see a crowd at the bottom. And because it was so incestuous in those ghettos, you would recognize anybody who was a stranger. That would be the presumption, that you were from the other community.
A lot of shouting of derogatory terms for Protestants was coming at us as we could see them. We were really frightened. Just stopped dead in our tracks at that point, like, “What are we going to do?” We’re two 14-year-old kids. This was very, very frightening. We just stood there.
Then all of a sudden this little old lady just appeared on the road on the opposite side. I nearly dropped dead. I couldn’t believe it. She walked straight across the road and she said, “Don’t worry, boys. I’m going to take you up the road. You’ll be okay. Just keep walking in front of me. Don’t say anything. Just keep quiet and keep walking.”
When we got down to the end of the bridge, we could see – and they were grown men. They were a good bit older than us. As soon as we got to that part of the bridge, they just stopped dead, like they’d frozen. There wasn’t a word from them and there wasn’t a movement to them. This old lady was just screaming at them, “They’re children! What’s the matter with you? Don’t you have children of your own? You’re going to attack children? What’s wrong with you?” They just stood there as we went past.
It was a small area, and we got past it and we were heading towards a road called Mountpottinger Road, which was adjacent to Camp Elmore Avenue, which was safe ground for us. As soon as we got there, we were okay. We wouldn’t have been in any danger at that stage.
We turned around to thank her, and she’d gone completely. And there was nowhere she could’ve gone to. There were no off streets or anything else. It was just the bridge. That’s all you could see, a strip of the road going onto the bridge. She couldn’t have gone anywhere. She was completely gone. We were completely shocked and obviously we were frightened, but we were relieved to be in an area where we were safe.
JIM HAROLD: She saved you. No question.
STEPHEN: She did, no question about that. I’m alive today because of her. We got home and we told our family – well past midnight, and they were laughing at us, saying, “You’re stupid. You went to a party and you were drunk.” We said, “No, this happened.” We were the butt of everybody’s jokes for ages. We just stopped telling people in the end because no one believed us and they were making fun of us. In Northern Ireland there’s a dark sense of humor. They make fun of everything and anything. [laughs]
But life goes on and takes over. Terry and I remained friends for a long time. He got married, had a wee family. I got into the music industry. I moved over to New York; I was living in Brooklyn, and I had a job in the city, at a record label.
Round about 2004, my mother’s health was starting to go downhill. I was the only remaining child. My brother passed away and my father was by himself, and he was quite emotional about it, and deeply concerned. She passed away in 2005, so I decided I would stay with my father and try to help him along the way because he was devastated by it.
We went along, it was okay. We started to get good again. And then in 2015, my father unfortunately was diagnosed with dementia. I took a career break to look after him. I didn’t want to put him in a care home. I thought that would be terrible, like putting him in the waiting room hell and running away from him. He wouldn’t have understood what was happening to him. I couldn’t do it.
Subsequently, he passed away in February 2020, just before COVID-19 kicked in. A couple of days before the funeral, an older gentleman arrived in our house. He was a boyhood friend of my father, a gentleman called Billy Lynch. I knew about him because my father had told me all about him, but I’d never met him before. He just turned up out of the blue to pay his respects. He said he’d heard about my dad passing and he wanted to come and pay his respects. It was a very nice thing to do.
We chatted, and he was telling me all these mad stories about him and my father when they were two young boys growing up in Southwest Belfast. Billy was a Catholic, my father was a Protestant. People in the area called them the two Billys because they were full of mischief, doing all sorts of things. The Trouble started in the late 1960s. Because of the Protestant/Catholic thing, they couldn’t remain friends. They just drifted apart.
It got late and I offered to drive home. He’s an elderly gentleman, in his eighties, and I didn’t think it would be a good idea to let him travel on public transport, so I offered him a lift. He told me that he lived in the Short Strand.
I told him about what had happened to my friend and I, and he laughed at me. He said, “Stephen, you met Molly of the night.” “What do you mean?” He told me all about her. She was an elderly lady who died of a broken heart. Her son was murdered on the Lagan backroad in 1971. He said there’d been several occasions when people had seen her and she’d appeared to people. But he said mostly it was people who were about to commit suicide and jump into the river. She’d talk them out of it and walk them to the opposite edge of the bridge.
He said, “That’s the only difference with your story, Stephen. There was no suicide.” I go, “Billy, my friend Terry took his own life on New Year’s Eve 2003.” I just thought, my goodness. That’s not a coincidence. That was something else here. It just shocked me a wee bit. I was fascinated.
To take it a little bit further, the COVID-19 restrictions had kicked in, so I had to wait a couple of weeks before I could get my father’s remains committed to the ground after the cremation. I was going to have to go by myself. Here in Northern Ireland, you weren’t allowed people at the funeral because of the COVID restrictions. But Billy turned up on that morning and he said he didn’t want me being on my own, so he came with me. I was delighted to see him.
I offered him a lift home again, and just as we were leaving the cemetery, he said, “Come over here. I want to show you something.” He took me over to a row of graves, and there it was: Molly’s grave. I said a prayer for her, thanked her for saving my life. When I go up there to visit my father, I always take some flowers and say hello to her, put them down beside her grave. I just thought it was a remarkable thing that someone, somewhere out there, in whatever stratosphere, decided that she would save two young boys who were very vulnerable and in real trouble.
JIM HAROLD: It really is a remarkable story. You hear these stories about people seeing somebody walking along the road. I think one of them – Resurrection Mary is one, I think. But this is very unique, specific. It’s not like this general lore from years ago. This is something that happened really, if you think about it, recently. This woman had just died in ’71, maybe a dozen years before this happened to you. So it was something that living people knew who this was. Just a remarkable story.
STEPHEN: Yep, and then to find out about it 20 odd, 30 years later when the whole thing came together. One of the things we were frightened about – there was a legend in Belfast – I don’t know if you’ve heard about it in America, the Titanic Children.
JIM HAROLD: No.
STEPHEN: When they were building the Titanic, in Ireland or UK, people went to work as soon as they could. There’d be children going to work at maybe 12, 13, 14 years old. There was no Health and Safety Association.
JIM HAROLD: Labor laws, yeah.
STEPHEN: Because they’re so small in stature, they could fit into areas of the ships when they were building them that grown men couldn’t. One of the jobs the children had to do was catch the rivets that didn’t hit. Those rivets were going as fast as bullets, and because they were so far down into the ship, when they picked up speed, they’d kill them. They were killed.
JIM HAROLD: Oh my gosh.
STEPHEN: They were young boys, maybe 10, 12, 13 years old. The legend has it that the ghosts of the Titanic Children appear on the Lagan because the River Lagan is where the Harland & Wolff shipyards were, where they built Titanic. It was always said that if you see the Titanic Children, something will happen.
During World War II, when Belfast was bombed by the Nazis, it was one of the worst bombings in the UK because they tried to bomb the shipyards, and apparently there were several sightings of the Titanic Children all along Lagan Bank that night when the air raid came. People are really frightened of it. If you see one, something awful will happen to you.
JIM HAROLD: It is fascinating. Fascinating stories, and specifically your very personal story. Stephen, thank you so much for being a part of the Campfire.
STEPHEN: Thank you, 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.
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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.
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You’re listening to Jim Harold’s Campfire.
JIM HAROLD: Kelly is on the line from California, and she has been listening for probably over 10 years. I really appreciate it. We appreciate all our listeners, but the folks that have been with us a long time, it’s a special place in my heart. Kelly has a very interesting story for us. I’m not going to tell you the title of this story because it’d kind of give it away, so I’ll let her tell it. But I’m fascinated by this subject, and I think we’re in for a really good one. Kelly, welcome to the show and tell us what happened.
KELLY: Great, thanks, Jim. I just want to say, love the Campfire. I listen with my 11-year-old daughter every week, so thanks so much for what you do.
JIM HAROLD: Thank you.
KELLY: Thank you. I’m not going to tell you the title either because then it would give it away. But it was November 1st, 2017. We’re actually recording five years later to the day today. I was having dinner at a nice restaurant in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco. I live in the Bay Area. We were celebrating my friend’s birthday with a group of friends. The Mission is one of the oldest neighborhoods in San Francisco; it was built in the late 1700s by the Spanish, and there’s a strong Mexican-American community there and still is.
After a lovely dinner and birthday wishes for my friend, we all stepped outside to walk around. It’s an urban neighborhood. We hear drumming and noise off in the distance. We walk for a few blocks to see what’s going on, what’s the drumming, and then we realized, “Oh, it’s November 1st, Dia de Los Muertos,” which is Day of the Dead. There was a celebration going on in Garfield Square Park, which is an urban city park of about four acres in the heart of this Mission neighborhood.
I remember we get to the park and the park did not have the lights on. It was dark and packed with people. Some people were dressed up like the walking skeletons with the painted faces to look like skulls, and there was a drum circle with about 30 drummers and a large group where people were dancing and celebrating. We wandered around and we were looking at all of the altars that had been set up in the park.
The altars – I don’t know if you’ve probably seen them, but they’re beautiful, elaborate tributes created by family members for their loved ones who have died. They include photographs of the deceased person, there’s mementos, there’s candles or flowers, usually marigolds, sugar skulls, and other offerings, like the deceased’s favorite food or drink. The point is to entice and welcome the spirit to visit their altar. Usually you’ll see a family member standing next to a loved one’s altar. But apparently that park sets up tables for anyone to bring photos and just set up a photo of their loved one and their own altar.
We were walking around and looking at these beautiful – it was kind of eerie, everything lit by candles, and we have drums off in the distance in the other part of the park. Like I said, some areas had several tables set up where anyone could set down a photograph of a loved one. I was looking at the photos of the deceased and these mini-altars on the tables, just wondering who these people were, any clues about their lives.
I noticed a framed 8 x 10 photo of a woman with candles lit up around it. There was no mementos, but just the framed photo. It looked like a headshot of something taken by a professional. She looked about 10 to 15 years older than me and was wearing a blue button-down shirt and smiling. I leaned in to get a closer look, and Jim, she looked exactly like me.
JIM HAROLD: Oh man, oh man. Whoa.
KELLY: Exactly like me. Her face, her smile, her hair color, the texture and length of her hair, her twinkly blue eyes and freckles. I have freckles. And even the way she tilted her head a bit sideways and leaned her cheek on her hand in the photo is something that I would do. It was like I was looking at myself. My friend was next to me and she said, “Hey, that looks just like you!” I said, “Yeah, it does. Wow, that’s crazy.” I was just really flabbergasted. My friend didn’t seem too fazed by it.
JIM HAROLD: Well, it wasn’t her. [laughs] I think I’d be a little more fazed than somebody who was just a bystander. Easy for her to say “No big deal!” [laughs]
KELLY: Yeah, she’s moving on where I’m like, my jaw is dropped. So she moved on to look at other things and I stayed by the photo for a while, just stared at it. I also looked for anyone nearby who might know this woman or could tell me who she is, but no one was at the table who could tell me who she was. It was just a mystery. And there’s no labels or anything, oftentimes, around the altars.
So I looked at the photo and I was trying to figure out, “How am I looking at a photo of myself right now?” And then I felt kind of lightheaded, and I looked around and thought, “Am I dead right now? Am I dead? Am I a spirit who is visiting my altar?” [laughs] It just felt really odd for a few moments, like I was not in my own body. But then I took a breath and I shook it off and went to catch up with my friend.
The rest of the night, I felt really strange. Later that night, I got home and I journaled about it to try to process what happened, and part of me thought, was the doppelganger a premonition of my future death, like my future dead self was what I was seeing in the photo? Because she was older, maybe 10-15 years at least. Was that going to be me in the photo, maybe? Or was it that I somehow embodied the spirit of this woman just for a moment who was visiting her own altar? I had thought of that. Did I just somehow enter – was I embodying her spirit somehow?
Or was it just a strange coincidence that this woman looked exactly like me? Some people ask whether I took a photo of the photograph with my phone. It crossed my mind for a second, but it was dark; I felt also it was disrespectful to take photos of the altars. It’s like going to a cemetery and taking photos. I don’t know, it just didn’t feel right. And nobody was taking photos, by the way.
I guess, Jim, I don’t know what it means to see your doppelganger who is dead. I searched online about doppelgangers; I’ve read seeing your doppelganger can be a bad omen. That was 2017. I would say definitely we’ve all had life challenges, but there’s been nothing terrible that has happened to me since then. But I haven’t come across stories where people see their doppelganger who is dead. So I’d be interested to hear if your listeners have had experiences like that, or what that could mean. So that is my Dia de Los Muertos doppelganger story.
JIM HAROLD: That’s such a neat story. I would say it’s a Campfire classic. It falls into one of my favorite categories, as you know listening all this time – that of headscratcher. There’s so many things that – were you visiting yourself? But then you were younger when you were actually visiting, but I guess technically, if time is pliable, as it seems like it might be, you were visiting yourself before you died. If you think about things in a very linear fashion, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
And then again, the fact that nobody was there – I’m not trying to freak you out or scare you, but was that person who was there actually your future loved one? And again, this could’ve been – you could pass away when you’re 100 or something, you know what I’m saying? It doesn’t necessarily mean a young death. In fact, I was just watching television the other day and they had a really interesting presentation on Day of the Dead. They were visiting this local arts organization that was doing a Day of the Dead thing, and they had different altars, and they show people at different stages of life. They would show somebody who lived to be 80-90 years old but showed them as a young person.
So seeing that doesn’t necessarily mean you wouldn’t – even if it were you, it would not necessarily mean you’re not going to live a long life. It just may’ve been you when you were a little bit younger. Because if that person was middle-aged, maybe you’re going to live to be 100, but that still could’ve been you. Does that make sense?
KELLY: Mm-hm.
JIM HAROLD: Again, I don’t know. I’m just speculating. That’s the one thing on these shows I want people to know. I am not an expert. I am just a guy who asks questions, who’s curious just like all of you. You just have these thought experiments that you throw out there. But they’re so fascinating, and this is such a fascinating story.
I know we’re running a little over, but I’m the host, so I’m allowed to do that. Here’s my question: Are you convinced that was you in the picture? Do you think it was just someone who looked a lot like you, or do you think that was you?
KELLY: I think for my own sanity, I’m thinking it was a coincidence it looks exactly like me, because I don’t want to freak myself out and think if that – and you’re right, who knows when that picture was taken. But if that’s my future dead self, I don’t want to have a self-fulfilling prophecy.
JIM HAROLD: That’s understandable.
KELLY: Where I’m thinking I might die in 15 years. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: Remember I said, the pictures I saw, they had people when they were very young and then they died when they were like 90 years old or something. But I can understand. It would freak me out. I totally get it.
KELLY: Yeah.
JIM HAROLD: Well, Kelly, thank you for calling in with a Campfire classic. I love it. Can’t wait to get it up on the show, and appreciate you in terms of your support and delivering us a fantastic story.
KELLY: Thanks so much, Jim, for having me.
JIM HAROLD: Next up on the Campfire is Lili, calling from my home state, Ohio, and we are so glad to have her with us. Her mom, Jen, told her about the show. Lili has become a loyal listener, so Jen, we appreciate it very, very much. And that’s what happens. You see things span a generation, a daughter tells a mother, a mother tells a daughter, a sister, an uncle, whoever, or a friend tells another friend, and then not only do we get more listeners, we get more great stories like the one we’re about to hear from Lili.
Lili has worked in a healthcare environment, and I’m fascinated by these kinds of stories. We’ve had stories in hospitals and things in the past, and I can’t wait to hear this one. Lili, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us from Ohio, and tell us what happened.
LILI: Thanks for having me, Jim. Like you said, this was in Cleveland, Ohio. At the time, I was working in a very large hospital downtown. I’m a respiratory therapist, so we do all kinds of stuff. At the time, I was working in the ICUs. We managed the ventilators, the life support machines. When these patients are real, real critical, I see patients – if they have to be transported to x-ray, CT scan, you have to have a respiratory therapist accompanying you with the portable ventilator.
On this day, I was helping, assisting getting a patient to the CAT scan. I’m rolling the portable ventilator. We roll into where the elevators are, and on the right there’s a large cargo elevator, and then on the left there’s a couple of smaller passenger elevators. We’re taking the larger elevator, and the doors open and we back in. So I go in first with the nurse, at the head of the bed. At the same time, there’s a small group of people loading into one of the passenger elevators.
So we’re backing into the elevator and I have my back against the wall of the elevator, and then this other group of people – there’s probably like five or six people getting into the passenger elevator. They walk in, and at the back of that group of people I see someone who looks very familiar. It was me, essentially.
JIM HAROLD: Whoa.
LILI: I’m looking at this person and we’re making eye contact. We’re staring at each other with the same expression, like “Am I really seeing this? What’s happening?” Then the door to the big elevator that I’m on with the patient and a couple of nurses and the doctor and everything starts closing. It’s sliding shut and I’m leaning as far as I can to the side to maintain eye contact with this other me because I’m just so weirded out, like “What am I looking at right now?” I’m leaning, the doors finally shut, and we go down to the basement and get the patient ready to go and everything. This whole time, I’m thinking, “That was really strange.”
JIM HAROLD: Let me make sure I understand and make sure the listeners understand. You were loading a patient for transport onto a freight elevator, essentially. Across the hall is the passenger elevator, where you would normally go up and down the floors if you weren’t transporting somebody. You’re transporting. You’re facing out towards the passenger elevator. You’re looking, and you see yourself looking back at you.
LILI: Yes.
JIM HAROLD: Wow.
LILI: And this myself looking back at me is at the rear of this small group of people, like five or six people. So it’s not like I’m looking at a mirror image or anything. There was a group of people. That’s why I was bending over as much as I could to get the most time viewing this other me that I can, because I’m just so weirded out. It was the weirdest thing. I wasn’t expecting it, it caught me off guard, it was strange. Yeah, super weird.
It doesn’t end there, too. Eventually – the day’s busy and everything; I stopped thinking about it. Then at the end of the day, I clock out, I walk with the usual group of people I do to the elevator to go to the parking garage to go home. We go into one of the small elevators across the way from the freight elevator, the cargo, the big one. At the same time, there is a group of workers still on the clock rolling a patient into the cargo elevator, backing in.
I go into the passenger elevator, the smaller one, and I’m at the back, and I can see across the way into the cargo elevator, the big one, and there is this person standing at the back of the elevator, rolling the portable ventilator… and it’s myself again.
Then the door to the big elevator starts closing, and this person in the cargo elevator, the very similar person to me, is leaning over, leaning over, trying to get the best look of me in the passenger elevator as they can until the doors shut. Same thing, I’m just staring at them like, “That’s another me staring at me from across the way.” I can’t look away either. We’re making eye contact and just staring with no expression at each other.
Finally, the elevator I’m in, the small one, the passenger one that I’m in with a group of my coworkers, we’re going down to the parking garage – I just was taken aback for a second, thinking – this was in the same day.
JIM HAROLD: That’s amazing.
LILI: This was just maybe five or six hours earlier from when I was leaving work. First of all, of course, I wasn’t expecting the first thing to happen. And then I see it again, so I’m like, “Okay, did I just see my doppelganger? Did I time travel?”
JIM HAROLD: I was about to say, it seems like the first time, you looked into the future and saw yourself in the passenger elevator, and then when you were actually in the passenger elevator, you were looking back in time and seeing yourself transporting the patient.
LILI: Yeah, that’s exactly it.
JIM HAROLD: Wow.
LILI: It was the same group of people. I didn’t pay attention to many details or anything, but it was the same kind of circumstances. They backed into the elevator. There was the same amount of people transporting the patient and so on. The first time, when I went down with the patient earlier, when I saw the me, I’m like, “Oh my God, did I see my doppelganger? I thought that was bad luck to see your doppelganger.”
Then when it happened later on in the day, I’m thinking, was this just something I somehow managed to be in two places at once? Was this a glitch in the universe? To this day I’m still bamboozled by it. This was several years ago.
JIM HAROLD: I get being bamboozled. The closest thing I’ve ever heard to that, one of the closest things – I’ve heard a couple things, but the one that comes to mind was a Campfire story, but there were years separating it. Basically, the story was this – and you may or may not have heard it. It was a young man who remembered when he was a little boy, he was running through the hall and went by his kitchen and he saw a hooded figure who was appearing to make a peanut butter sandwich. He ran away right away because it scared him. It’s like, “Who’s this person in a hoodie in my kitchen making a peanut butter sandwich?”
Fast forward several years later, he’s minding his own business, he’s in the kitchen, he’s a teenager, he’s making himself a peanut butter sandwich with his hoodie on, and he looks and he sees this little figure run through the hall and then run away just as fast.
LILI: That’s it. That’s exactly – that’s it.
JIM HAROLD: Except it was years later, not hours later. But it’s the same principle.
LILI: Yeah, exactly. I heard this thing in stories I’ve read or heard or things like that – I’ve always heard people say that they think mirrors are portals. I thought that was interesting. But I always thought that elevators were portals in some kind of way because it’s like a closed-off, tiny space where things can happen. You have that anxiety of being stuck. I don’t know. That might sound weird to some people, but that’s what I always thought too. And I thought that before this whole weird story happened.
JIM HAROLD: You freaked me out so much – I’m in my Spooky Studio and it’s soundproof, but I do have a window here that I have open, and I’m looking out and it’s nighttime. And as soon as we get off the phone, Lili, I’m going to close the window. I’m afraid of what I’ll see. Ooh, chills.
LILI: [laughs] Yeah. My mom, who introduced me to you, was always very spiritual. She still is. That piqued my interest, passed down to me and everything. So that might be why that happened. But I’ve had various other interesting things happen like that. This was probably one of the weirdest things.
JIM HAROLD: I think so. Lili, this is an instant Campfire classic story, all-time great story.
LILI: Thanks.
JIM HAROLD: Thank you so much for joining us tonight on the Campfire and sharing it with us.
LILI: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. This was fun.
JIM HAROLD: Next up is Benny from Washington State. We’re so glad to have him on the line. He says he and his friend, his coworker Art, listen to both this and the Paranormal Podcast, and they regularly talk about it almost daily at work, different topics that we cover. So Art, thank you so much. Stay spooky. And Benny, we thank you so much for listening since 2016 and for calling in today. I was really excited when I saw your message because you’re going to tell us about a possible Skinwalker sighting. This sounds fascinating. Thank you for joining us, and please tell us what happened.
BENNY: Thanks for having me, Jim.
JIM HAROLD: Go ahead.
BENNY: I live in rural southeastern Washington, and I have to cross the border into northern Oregon for where I work. I leave for work at what I call the vampire hours, which is I’m leaving the house at three o’clock in the morning, so it’s still well dark. I like to take the back windy roads because I ride a motorcycle. Well, growing up here, I’ve seen every manner of critter that you can have running around the countryside. We’ve got deer, elk, cougar, bear, etc.
On my way to work, driving through this stretch of the back, windy roads, I see a dead deer lying up a couple hundred yards in the road. Didn’t think too much of it. As soon as I got closer, I noticed there was something over the top of the deer, feeding on it. Couldn’t tell what it was. I got a little bit closer to it, about 70 feet give or take, and it stood up on two legs. And when this thing stood up, it looked like if you’ve seen the Harry Potter movies, when Remus is going through his transformation into the werewolf, that’s what this thing looked like. Gray skin, patchy fur. It was huge.
The thing stood up and walked across the road on two legs, got to the other side of the road, dropped back down on all fours and took off across the cornfield.
JIM HAROLD: Wow.
BENNY: I stopped my motorcycle, shook my head. I was like, “Did I see something?” And not only that, I’ve seen this thing four separate times since then including yesterday morning. And the funniest part about it – there was this officer driving in front of me that it ran right in front of his cruiser and he pulled off and turned a spotlight on it. I wonder what the report on that one had to be.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, wow. So you’ve seen this thing four, five times?
BENNY: Yes. And it’s always the same half-mile stretch of road. It’s on a windy backroad between Walla Walla, Washington and Milton-Freewater, Oregon.
JIM HAROLD: Wow, somebody needs to get on that. Some cryptozoologist out there needs to get out there and do an investigation. Benny, can you explain to us exactly what it looks like, as best you can tell from your sightings?
BENNY: The only way I can really describe it would be between what you would picture a werewolf to be and like a zombie because it’s real gangly and gray looking, but yet has fur and muscle to it, if that makes any sense. It’s really strange. It was weird looking. I’d never seen anything like that the first time I saw it. I was like, “Man, did I see something here? Am I just weird or what’s going on here?” And then as I’ve seen it several times since then, I was like, man, there’s something with this.
I started looking into different cryptids around, and the closest thing that comes to it would be a Skinwalker. Now, there are several different tribes around, and this area was even known for when Chief Joseph led the Nez Perce through here to go down to Wallowa.
JIM HAROLD: Wow.
BENNY: So anything’s possible, but man, this thing is something different.
JIM HAROLD: It sounds like it’s equally adept whether it’s on all fours or it’s standing up.
BENNY: Oh yeah, there was no skipping its beat when it went from two legs back down to all fours and took off across that cornfield.
JIM HAROLD: It’s one thing to eat a dead animal because lots of animals do that. That’s very common. But do you think that it was threatening in any way? Or was it always trying to get away from humans?
BENNY: I didn’t feel threatened by it even on my motorcycle. I was just more curious as to what it really was, to be honest. But it didn’t seem to pay me any mind whatsoever. It just went right about its business and boop, boop, gone.
JIM HAROLD: Have you heard any other reports in the area?
BENNY: There’s been reports of several different mysterious things sighted, including UFOs as recently as August and September of this year. It’s been all over even the news here.
JIM HAROLD: For those of us not familiar, I assume this is a highly, highly forested area, a lot of wilderness, right?
BENNY: Not very forested, but it is very rural, more farm country than anything else where I’m at. About an hour’s drive and you’re in the woods.
JIM HAROLD: Okay, interesting. I forgot – you said it was first time in the morning?
BENNY: Every time, it’s been early in the morning because I leave for work and I’m riding to work at three o’clock in the morning.
JIM HAROLD: Wow, that is cool. I tell ya, I hope that you’ll keep us updated, and if you see it again, please do sign up, get in touch with me. We would love to have you back on and get any further reports on this. A lot of times when we talk to people, it’s not an active situation. We talk to people about things that happened five months, five years, or five decades ago. But to have something like this, it seems like we’re right I the middle of it. I would love to keep updated on this, Benny.
BENNY: I’m going to keep up on it because I’ve even mounted a GoPro on my motorcycle, so I’m going to start recording when I’m riding in the morning just so I can get a chance.
JIM HAROLD: That sounds like a smart thing.
BENNY: If I catch anything, you’ll get the footage, that’s for sure.
JIM HAROLD: Thank you so much, Benny. Please keep us updated, and thank you so much for being a part of the Campfire.
BENNY: Will do, Jim.
JIM HAROLD: Jay is on the line. He is a longtime listener and also has been on the show before. He’s calling in today from Utah, and he has a workplace story. We’re so glad to have him with us. Jay, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us, and please tell us what happened.
JAY: Thanks, Jim. It was one of my first jobs I ever had, and I worked at ShopCo, which I think is now out of business, at least here in Utah. We were doing our nightly shift and closing up the store, and I was just doing my nightly duties, counting all the tills, getting all the returns and bringing all the hangers into the back room.
I had gathered up all the hangers, was bringing them to the bin in the back, and I noticed that there was an employee trying to go into the receiving office in the back room. I didn’t really think too much of it. I had never seen the person before, but figured they were on the morning shift and I usually worked night shifts. So I went on with what I was doing, and on my way back out I didn’t see the person there anymore.
We all met up front again to do our nightly walk, and my manager asked, “Okay, I think everyone’s here. Let’s go through, let’s get this walk done.” That’s when I was like, “Um, I think we’re missing someone. I saw someone in the back room unlocking that receiving door. Should we wait for them?” She was like, “No, I think this is everyone. There’s no one else scheduled.” She started panicking a little bit. I was like, “There’s someone in the back room.” I described them. It was a lady in her mid-fifties, and she had her ShopCo uniform on and she had a popped collar.
Immediately when I said that, my manager freaked out. She was like, “Okay, we don’t have to walk the store tonight. Let’s just everyone clock out and let’s get out of here.” So we all rushed to go upstairs and clock out. She was kind of freaking out. I pulled her aside and I was like, “What is going on? Is everything okay?” She’s like, “No, we just need to get out of here right now. I think there’s something wrong.” I was like, “Okay.”
So we all rushed out and we were in the front of the store outside, and she was in tears. I was like, “What is going on?” That’s when she looked at me and she’s like, “You described a lady who used to work here.” I won’t use her name – may she rest in peace – because she actually passed away and had a heart attack in that receiving office that I saw her trying to unlock.
JIM HAROLD: Oh my gosh. Wow.
JAY: Yeah. Ever since then, being in that store – it’s probably a Spirit Halloween by now. [laughs] But that building sat vacant for years, and I never stepped foot in there again after I quit that job. We would always hear weird noises upstairs, things getting dragged across the floor upstairs. There was always just something really off. You never felt alone. Even sometimes when you were opening or closing and you were alone, it always felt like someone was there or someone was staring at you or something like that. It was pretty scary.
JIM HAROLD: Do you think that it was a residual thing? Do you think it was like a replay? Or do you think she knew you were there? Or what do you think?
JAY: I think it was more a residual haunting just because it seemed so routine, like if that was her opening – because the receiving people would come in super early in the morning or very late at night. So it felt like it was routine – go in, unlock the office, get everything ready for the next day or to receive the truck or whatever it was. It was a very off-putting experience.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, I guess so.
JAY: It really freaked me out. As a 17-year-old kid, I was like, “I’m good. I don’t want to do that again.” [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: [laughs] Well, Jay, that is a great story. It really is. Again, when you think about it, we spend typically a third of our lives in the place where we work, so it really does become an important thing. Maybe sometime years from now – a place where I worked, there was a radio station – they’ll see me hunched over my desk, like I’m typing on a keyboard. Or maybe whoever gets this house many years from now will see some guy sitting here and talking into the ether. [laughs] Who knows, who knows.
But seriously, we put our time, we put our energy, we put our heart into our work, whether we’re working in a retail store, in an office, in a factory. There’s a lot of emotion there, and a lot of people love their job or they really care about their job – or some people hate their job. It seems like the situation certainly would be right, and was right there at that ShopCo. That is a great story. Jay, thank you for being a part of the Campfire once again.
JAY: Thanks, Jim.
JIM HAROLD: Well, that’s a wrap for 2022 and the Campfire, and we will be back next week in 2023 for an all-new Campfire that you can look forward to, and many more stories to come. So excited about it. I hope you have a great New Year celebration. Of course, be careful about that. Be smart, be safe, have a good time, and we’ll be back next week. Happy New Year, everybody! 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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