There are many hauntings on this episode of Campfire!

TRANSCRIPT

You like hauntings? We’ve got hauntings on this week’s Campfire.

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

JIM HAROLD: Welcome to the Campfire. I am Jim Harold and so glad to be with you once again, and if you are new here, what we do, quite simply, is regular folks come on and they tell their very personal stories of the strange. Could be ghosts, could be a haunted house, could be UFOs, could be cryptid creatures, could be my favorite, headscratchers – they don’t quite fit in to any one category. But whatever they are, they are amazing.

Something we’re going to do today, we’re going to get right to the content, and here is our first great Campfire story.

You know, lately we’ve been getting more calls from Canada, and I for one am glad to see it. James is on the line from Ontario, Canada, and he’s going to tell us about a haunted house. We love those stories. James, welcome to the show and please tell us what happened.

JAMES: Thanks for having me. I moved in April 2007 just outside of a village about two hours north of Toronto called Lafontaine. It’s a little off the beaten path. But as I say, April 2007. Nothing really happened in the house until October. I got a cat. G.I. Dill was his name. My suspicion is that is what triggered things.

The first thing that happened was I was sleeping in bed and it was about three o’clock in the morning. It’s an open concept house. We had a glass tabletop coffee table out in the living room. I could hear the cat out there, and I could hear rattling on the table. I thought, okay, he’s up on the table and he’s pushing the glass along. So I yelled at him, “Cut the crap.” The glass kept rattling. “Okay, I guess I’d better get up and deal with it.”

I put my hand down to get up and he’s right next to me, and I can still hear this glass rattling around out there. I’m an ex-military guy, correctional officer, all this good stuff. I just had this really bad feeling about this. “Maybe you don’t want to know.” So I went back to bed.

Anyway, the next thing that happened – I never recorded any of this stuff; I really should have. I was down in the basement. That’s one of our points of entry. I was cross-legged, fixing the vacuum. My back was to the door. My girlfriend at the time, Michelle, lived in Toronto still, and she would come up whenever we had time off together. So I’m cleaning this vacuum out and I hear the door open up and shut behind me.

I look behind me to say, “What are you doing here?” and there’s this man standing there. He looks to be about 45 years old, in his forties, well-dressed, solid as you or I, and he’s looking at me. And then he’s gone. I think it was such a surreal incident that I just went, “Huh,” and went back to fixing the vacuum. About 20 minutes later, after I’m upstairs, it all hit me at once. I was like, what the hell was that?

What started to happen was – we had a few more cats; we had about three of them, and we had an English bull terrier, Asher. Nothing really happened with him. We would just catch him staring at things all the time, like down the stairs. You would actually have to walk up and clap your hands together to snap him out of it. But what was happening with the cats – we would go out to dinner or something and come back and we couldn’t find the cats. We’d find them locked up in a closet somewhere. They’re on rails; they’re folding closets. It’s like, okay, I’m pretty sure this thing was shut when we left. And all three of them are locked up in there, screaming their heads off. Even if they got in there on their own, they couldn’t have possibly shut the door behind them, so something is doing this.

I guess the next thing that happened was we had a fellow who was doing some renovations for us. We were having to go to Toronto for some meetings. We would leave on Sunday night and we would come back on Friday evening, and I would see him and say, “You got a lot of work done this week. That’s great.” And he would look at me and say, “You know this place is haunted, right?” He just seemed kind of reserved about saying this.

He had a few guys come over, one of whom slept the night in the house the first night and slept in the truck the rest of the week. He wouldn’t come back in the house. Never said why.

Finally, I was outside and I saw Ken – he was the renovator – and he was struggling with these sliding glass doors we were having put in the bedroom. I came up to him and I said, “Ken, do you want a hand with that?” He looked at me dumbfounded and he said, “How did you get out here so fast?” I said, “What are you talking about?” He goes, “Just a couple seconds ago you were pacing back and forth in the bedroom.” I said, “Ken, no one’s been in that bedroom for others.” He looked at me and he said, “You know this place is haunted, right?”

Another time I was working at night, around one o’clock in the morning, and we were in the module and the phone rings. My partner hands me the phone and he says, “It’s Michelle. She sounds freaked out.” I get on the phone and go, “What’s going on?” She say, “I’m in the living room and upstairs” – where our bathroom is, we had a toilet paper holder with a lid on it, and she said someone took the lid off and threw it down the hall. Then she said the coffee table in the basement, it sounded like somebody picked it up twice and dropped it.

I was doing some studying on this because of everything that was going on. I said, yeah, these things are pretty freaky, but I don’t think there’s ever been a case of anybody actually being harmed by something.

The next thing that happened was I was up in the kitchen area, and like I said, we have an open concept house. As I was cleaning out the recycling, I had this feeling that something was watching me. I looked over and there was this old woman. She’s looking at me, as solid as you or I, and then she was gone. Pretty much every hair on my head lifted upright.

A few days later, we were having a bit of a party at our house. We’re having a bonfire, and we’re all out in the back there. Everything goes off well. A few days later, we’re going to another institution for some training and I’m with a friend of mine, and he says to me – he was one of the people at the party, and he goes, “So which one of your parents is staying with you?” I said, “What are you talking about?” He goes, “When we got home, my wife told me that she looked up from the backyard, from the bonfire, and there was this old woman standing in the kitchen window staring at us, and then she left.”

I said, “Yeah, no one’s parent is staying with us. This is what’s been going on.” We’d actually kept this quiet. At the end of it, he was like, “So you’re telling me that my wife saw a ghost?” Well, maybe she did.

To be honest, we thought this was actually kind of cool, what was going on with all this stuff. But then things started to escalate. It started getting aggressive. We came home one night and one of our cats was locked in the bathroom, and she had a divot on the side of her head. Something had kicked her.

JIM HAROLD: Oh my.

JAMES: We were like, maybe we should do something about this. What spurred it all on was we had a sliding glass door in our bedroom. There wasn’t a deck out there at that point; it was all just loose gravel. It was September and really, really hot out, so I had the screen door shut and locked and the glass door opened up. I woke up about three o’clock in the morning to a huge crash. I came to, I looked over, and from my bed I could see this figure slamming the door shut again. It seemed to be in this shroud. You could see it in the moonlight. Not very clearly, but it was definitely there and it was looking in after it slammed the door shut again.

The first thing I thought was it was my girlfriend and she was sleepwalking. I remember thinking to myself, “You’re not supposed to wake up people who are sleepwalking.” I put my hand down to get up to usher her back in the room and I felt this elbow. I’m like, “Okay, she’s here.” I quickly glanced down at her and back, and this thing was gone. And like I said, it was all loose gravel you there. There were no footfalls, no running away, nothing.

I walked over; I looked out there. I went around the whole house. I locked all the doors, all the windows. I came back. She had the lights on and she’s looking at me, and she goes, “What the hell was that?” I said, “I don’t know.” We went out the next morning, we couldn’t find anything.

She actually found a couple of – they call them Native Institutional Liaison Officers. They’re the people that deal with the Aboriginal groups. Really good people. We found out they were actually mediums, and we asked them if they were interested in dealing with this. I tried to tell them what was going on; they said, “We don’t want to know. The less we know when we go in there, the better off we’ll be. We won’t have any preconceived notions about anything.”

They came in; they went through the entire house. They came back and said, “There’s three of them here. There’s a middle-aged man. He’s the aggressive one. He’s confused, he’s angry. He doesn’t know what’s going on. There’s an old woman here. She’s trying to convince him to leave. And there’s a little girl here.” I never saw any of her. They told us none of them had any connection with the house or the property. They were just here.

They said, “What do you want us to do?” I said, “Maybe it’s time to send them along to where they should be,” and they said, “That’s probably the best idea.” So they went about a smudging ceremony, and as soon as they commenced it, literally thunder, lightning like you wouldn’t believe. My girlfriend and I were saying, “I hope we’re not making this worse.”

They went through the entire house doing the smudging ceremony. They came back and said, “Okay, they’re gone.” And afterwards it was a very odd feeling. Before, no matter how much you cleaned everything up, put everything in its place, everything seemed kind of cluttered. That feeling just seemed to be gone. It was very odd.

The only other thing that’s happened since then was three years ago, I was with – not her anymore, but my wife now, and I was in our bedroom. It’s Sunday, about 5 a.m. I’m getting dressed for work, and it’s pitch black. I’ll take hell for this, but I know it wasn’t her because I could hear her snoring. I heard this female voice say, “Hello?” And again, every hair on my head stood up. I went downstairs and I spoke out loud. I said, “Okay, I don’t mind that you’re here, and I think we can cohabitate here very peacefully. I don’t have a problem with you being here.”

Well, I’d been missing a t-shirt which I really liked for about three or four months. Alien, “In Space No One Can Hear You Scream” was the tagline. That was the t-shirt. I’ve seen that movie. It’s kind of a misnomer; they made a lot of noise when they died. But I couldn’t find this thing. About two days after this had occurred, I open a drawer and there it is sitting right on top, all nice and neatly folded. I went to my wife and I said, “Did you find that shirt I’d been looking for?” She said, “No.” I told her what happened and she said, “Well, at least this one seems to be helpful.”

A few days after that, I couldn’t find my handcuffs keys for my belt. I always toss my belt in my car, and I figured they broke off in the car somewhere. I went through the entire car, couldn’t find them. I said, “Oh great, now I’ve got to go in to work and write a report.” I open up the door, look down, and sitting dead center in the driver’s seat are these handcuff keys.

Again, like my wife said, at least this one seems to be helpful. We haven’t heard anything from her since, and maybe that’s for the best. Anyway, that’s pretty much my story for you.

JIM HAROLD: You’re still at the house?

JAMES: Absolutely, yeah. Love it here.

JIM HAROLD: That’s a question, because some people say, “I love my house. I wouldn’t leave it for the world.” Some people are like, “Get me out of here!” But you – well, it seems to have quieted down, but you’ve decided, “This is my house. This is what I love, and I’m not moving.”

JAMES: People ask me about that. They’re like, “Are you crazy, still living there? Doesn’t it disturb you that this happened?” To me, it’s actually the exact opposite. It doesn’t disturb me in the slightest. This tells me that after we die, that’s not the end of it. Something happens afterwards. I don’t know what. I’m not religious; I’m not going to say any of that. But yeah, we know once we go from this Earth, it’s not over. I actually find that very comforting.

JIM HAROLD: Actually, to be honest with you, I feel the same way about this show, having done it for years. I was a believer in the afterlife before podcasting ever existed, but having spoken to so many people on this show who’ve had various types of experiences, it has convinced me even more so than I was before that the afterlife is real. It’s an interesting way, though, of looking at it in terms of a haunted house. That’s great.

Well, James, thank you so much for joining us from the north. We appreciate it, and thanks for being a part of the Campfire.

JAMES: Thank you very much.

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You’re listening to Jim Harold’s Campfire.

JIM HAROLD: We have a return caller. We really appreciate our return callers. We appreciate all our callers, but a special gold star for our return callers. Sydney is on the line from Kentucky. She said before she had a heartwarming story for us, but this time she has – well, something a little more spooky. Sydney, welcome back to the show. Thanks for joining us, and tell us what happened.

SYDNEY: Hi, Jim. Thanks for having me back. Like you said, before I had a heartwarming story that I told about grandparents, and I said I would call back with a more spooky one to balance things out, so I guess here I am.

JIM HAROLD: All right.

SYDNEY: This story takes place back around 2011. I had brought a gentleman I was dating at the time back to my hometown, and it was Halloween. We all decided that we were going to go ghostbusting because it was Halloween and the veil was thin, and it was a small town, so there’s nothing to do. So we had gone to a very old mansion that is called the Mayo Mansion. It was built in the early/mid 1800s, and the gentleman who built it was only around for about two years after the building was built. So he didn’t really get to enjoy it. I’d always heard stories, and I had gone to that school when I was very young, and everything was super spooky in there.

So we had walked around and were asking questions and recording with video, but just doing it for the audio purposes. I still have the recording. We had asked about music, and I always think that music is kind of a universal language for everybody, and I guess that involves the other side, because once we brought up music, in the recording you can hear a lady humming. We had addressed his wife, and in the recording you can hear me react to it. I go, “Oh gosh, you scared me.” The gentleman I was with was like, “What are you talking about?” I was like, “That was you.” He had absolutely no idea. He couldn’t hear it.

We didn’t know it was on the recording until after we were completely finished and we were in the car relistening to it. The humming happens two times, once that I react to and then a second time while I’m speaking, and I’m the only lady there and it’s a female voice that hums again.

It’s something that I cannot explain. I like to believe, but I also try to be a healthy skeptic just to keep me balanced, I guess, but it is something that I honestly cannot explain. I’ve had another incident where I had another recording happen that was a male voice, and it’s questionable – when you hear stories – I bounce between your Paranormal Podcast, the Campfire, and then The Box of Oddities. That’s my weekly routine.

JIM HAROLD: Oh, cool. We love The Box of Oddities. Kat and Jethro.

SYDNEY: Kat and Jethro are amazing. But I try to listen to everybody’s story, and there’s ones that you – it’s not a creak in the floor, it’s not a floorboard, it’s not an appliance, and there’s certain things that you can’t explain, and that’s one of mine. That’s my tried and true, go-to self ghost story that I have.

JIM HAROLD: Let me ask you this: if you knew that you could experience it again, would you go back? Or did you get more than you bargained for?

SYDNEY: Oh, 100% I’d go back. In a heartbeat. You hear the Ouija board stories, and I don’t want to mess around too much. Curiosity kills the cat. But there’s just so much of the unknown that some of us want to know.

JIM HAROLD: there you go. Well, a great story indeed, and that’s pretty cool. Music is universal, as you say, and I guess that does go over to the other side. Sydney, thank you for joining us tonight on the Campfire.

SYDNEY: Thanks for having me, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: Next up we have a fellow podcaster, Lee from the UK. He’s been on the show before, and he has a show called Bizarre Tales, which I think would be of great interest to our audience here. He’s going to tell us a little bit about that later. But first, he’s going to tell you about this extraordinary UFO encounter he had. Very interesting. He’s told me a little bit about it, but I can’t wait to hear the rest of the story. Lee, welcome back to the show and tell us this UFO story.

LEE: Hello, Jim, and thank you for having me back. I was going to say “welcome to my show” there. I got confused. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: [laughs] I’ve had the same experience. I forget, is this my show or is this someone else’s show? I’ve had the same thing happen. I get it.

LEE: Yeah. So this UFO, shall we get into this, then?

JIM HAROLD: Absolutely.

LEE: I’m 38 now, but probably when I was about 16 years old, something like that, long story short, it was me, a brother, and another fellow friend, and we’d gone to what is essentially a disused graveyard. That’s quite important because a lot of UFO sightings seem to take place over graveyards for whatever reason. Churches, graveyards, and then obviously over water and things. That’s the top two areas where they’re seen.

Anyway, disused graveyard. We’re there, and the idea is we’re going to dig a hole under a fence. Me and the other lads used to play this game, basically like – I don’t know what you call it in the States. We call it tiggy or tracky. You have to catch the opposite team. So we’re going to dig this hole under this fence so we, this team, would know about it and the other team wouldn’t. Bit sly. So we snuck out at night. It’s probably about eight o’clock at night, something like that, and it’s dark.

Anyway, we’re digging, and immediately it became clear that this was not going to be so easy. The ground was like concrete. My brother was like, “Nah, I’m not doing that.” So he just went and lay on this tree branch, a limb that was sticking out of this tree. He just leaned on it like a hammock and sat there, and we’re digging away, me and Gary.

A few minutes go past and my brother says, “Look at this tsar. It’s quite big.” It really was. It was probably a quarter of the size of the moon. It was a full moon, and this star was about a quarter the size of the moon, so you can imagine that’s pretty unusual. But it just looked like a star; apart from the size, nothing out of the ordinary. So we carry on digging.

Maybe 15 minutes go past and my brother says, “Hey, that star’s moving.” We think he’s pulling our leg. We look, and to be honest, Jim, if you didn’t keep your eye on it, you wouldn’t have known it was moving. It was that subtle a movement. So we’re all stood there and we took about three paces forward – it was on an embankment – just so we could get a clearer view of this. It’s now a park, this disused graveyard, and there’s trees all over. So we just took a few steps forward and we could see it. Like I said, the only reason you could really tell it was moving is because it was moving the direction of the moon in the sky, so you could see the gap shortening.

Anyway, we’re stood and we looked at each other like, “What is that?” Before we could even finish that sentence, this star had become a craft. It was – I’m estimating, but I’m going to say it was probably only 100 feet above our head. It was probably about 100 feet above our head and probably getting on for about 100 meters long, and probably about half as wide, 50 meters wide, something like that. I’m pretty confident on that because I’ve been under a Chinook helicopter – I think you have them in the States.

JIM HAROLD: Right. I know what they are.

LEE: That’s roughly about the size of this thing above our head.

JIM HAROLD: Wow.

LEE: But it’s in a figure of eight, which is unusual. I’ve not seen it in many documentaries on UFOs – obviously I’m a big fan of it now. But essentially, from underneath it looked like a figure of eight. Two overlapping circles. What was really interesting about the whole thing – obviously, there was no sound. There seemed to be a static buzzing coming off it, but not from the craft itself; from the energy around it. The air seemed to be crackling. But essentially there was no noise. It just hovered there, stationary.

We were watching it for a bit, and then there was a guy walking across the park with a couple of German shepherd dogs, and somebody – I don’t know who it was, but somebody shouted to him, one of the lads, “Hey mister, what’s that?” and pointed up. This guy took one look up and just started running. His life was over, to him. He was gone. Because he started running, we started running. But I want to make it clear, there was no jeopardy for us. This thing was there, but there was no jeopardy at all. It was just literally this guy had run, so we ran.

We run home, and this is the bizarre – I mean, that’s bizarre, but this is really bizarre. We didn’t speak about it. I can’t remember speaking about it the next day, that night, never. I’m going to go forward now maybe six years or so, so I’m probably roughly in my early twenties now. I’m watching a documentary at home about UFOs. This is going to sound weird, I know, but I’m watching this documentary and I’m thinking, “Oh, this is interesting.” There’s a little old lady. She pulled up at these traffic lights, in Wales I think, and she saw this light in the sky. As she was stopped at the traffic lights, this light became a craft. I swear it looked like a dumbbell shape. It was slightly in front of her – obviously, this thing was overhead for us. So a dumbbell shape might actually fit the shape we saw.

But as she said that on this documentary, this memory of what I’ve just explained to you came flooding back. That memory was gone. I’ve heard about this with people who have car crashes, that sort of thing, where the trauma, they suppress the memories so you don’t relive it. Was that happening here? I’m not sure.

Anyway, I ring my brother up, bearing in mind this is six or seven years after we’ve seen this thing. Ring him up, say, “Come round here. I want to show you this.” He comes round and sits with me. I played what I just told you. I just played it; I didn’t say anything to him. When it finished playing on the telly, he turned to me and went, “That’s what we saw.” I went, “You remember?” He went, “I remember everything.” It all came back to him from seeing this.

So it’s not just me. That’s him as well. Unfortunately, I’ve lost contact with Gary. I’d like to do the same with him, but I’ve not been able to catch up with him. But it came back to my brother, and I said to him, “Talk me through what you remember,” and he said exactly what I said to you. The only different thing that he remembered slightly different to me is that the underside of this craft – he could remember the detail of it. I could just remember the outline of it, but he could remember the detail.

Do you remember the old reels, the film reels that you used to get?

JIM HAROLD: Oh yeah.

LEE: They used to have those four or five holes cut out. Essentially, the bottom of these two circles looked like that. They had these holes embossed into it, I would say. They weren’t holes through it, but they were a different texture. When he said that, that came back to me.

For me, it’s always been – is it ours, is it alien? It’s impossible to say. But the one thing that leans me more to thinking alien than military hardware, let’s say, is first of all, it was over a public area, which you’d think was unusual for military craft. Not that we don’t have military craft flying around here, but obviously they’re more conventional. But that memory suppression is very strange.

The other thing is that it seemed to know what we were thinking. It was almost like when we were looking at it, it knew we were looking at and it gave us a nod and a wink. “I’m here and then gone again.” I should point out, by the way, it actually left in a very similar manner to how it arrived. It moved maybe 50 yards, something like that, and then it just blinked out again. Gone. It arrived and left in the same manner, which again is unusual.

For me, if you put me on the spot and said, “Is it alien? Is it ours?”, I would say I’m leaning towards it being alien, just for the fact that it seemed to understand what we were thinking. You tell me how that happens.

JIM HAROLD: That is something else, Lee. Has it changed your attitude towards the UFO phenomenon in general, your thoughts on it, what it is?

LEE: It’s interesting because obviously I had an interest in UFOs before I remembered this, because I was obviously watching a documentary about UFOs. But I don’t know; I’ve always been a believer that there’s something out there. I just think it would be strange if there wasn’t. And obviously, with what’s going on nowadays, we seem to be getting to that point where we’re going to be told that there is something out there. Some people need that. I don’t particularly need that. I know I’ve seen what I’ve seen.

The only issue I’ve got is are they good, are they bad? I think it was Sir Stephen Hawking who said the fact that they don’t make contact can only mean one thing, and that’s sinister. I’ll leave you with that.

JIM HAROLD: Very good. Well, you’re not going to leave us quite yet because you have to tell us about your podcast, what it is, and how people can find it.

LEE: Thank you very much. The podcast is Bizarre Tales Podcast. It’s the one with an owl logo. There is another one with a similar name which might pop up if you look for it, but it’s got an owl. It’s pretty cool, I think. Not quite as cool as Campfire, but you know. Essentially, we look at a different topic each week. At the moment – this might be interesting – England is notorious for having ghost stories. Every pub, every castle, that sort of thing.

So what we decided to do is a series, essentially, showing every county in England – I think there’s 46 or 48 counties if you include everything – we’re going to do an episode on each county. Each county’s going to get its own episode and a ghost from that county, so 46 episodes of that. You guys might be interested in that because it’s British ghost stories.

That’s essentially what we do. We break down a story or we do this series. Those stories and paranormal and even bizarre tales. We’ve done missing person cases, that kind of stuff. We did a show on the wicked world of bread. That was about superstitions around the world involving bread, for instance.

JIM HAROLD: That’s interesting. The kinds of superstitions that people have are amazing, even around something like bread. So Lee, the question is – tell us one more time where they can find it, how they can tune in.

LEE: You can find it pretty much everywhere you can get podcasts. It is Bizarre Tales Podcast. You google that and you’ll find it, I’m sure.

JIM HAROLD: Bizarre Tales Podcast. Make sure that you check it out, everybody. Lee, thanks for sharing your story and telling us a little bit about Bizarre Tales.

LEE: Thank you.

JIM HAROLD: Nicki is on the line from Mississippi, and we’re so glad to have her on the line. She’s going to talk about some paranormal experiences at her dad’s home. Nicki, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us, and please tell us your story.

NICKI: Hi. Thank you. A little bit of backstory, my parents are divorced, so I would go every other weekend to my dad’s house, which was in a town probably 30 minutes away. They lived in this house that was probably built in the ’40s. It was just a simple little brick home, but there were a lot of really weird things that happened there.

My dad owned a trucking company, so he would often have some of his drivers come and stay there. These would be grown men that were rough and rugged, and they would stay in my bedroom because I wasn’t there most of the time, so sometimes they would stay before they would leave for the next day. Usually they would stay one time and that would be it. They would say they’d have these really weird experiences where they would see a figure in the room, they would feel someone sitting down on the bed next to them. Sometimes covers would be taken off the bed. Just a lot of weird things.

JIM HAROLD: Do you have any thoughts of why this particular house had all this activity?

NICKI: As far as from what we learned, there was a young boy who had my room. The time period that I was there was in the late ’90s, and apparently a young man had lived there in the early ’80s, and he was killed in a really tragic accident. So we thought that was part of it, and then I think three elderly people had passed from natural causes in the house. So we just assumed that that was part of it. Of course, you don’t know, but we assumed that.

There would be other really strange things that would happen. One instance that sticks out in my mind is I was about 14, and I had been sick. I was really tired, so I was asleep, and I slept for a really long time. A lady from our church who was just the sweetest lady called my dad, pretty late at night, and she was like, “I saw your daughter walking down this dirt road out beside your house. Is she okay? I don’t know what’s going on.” My dad was like, “What are you talking about?”

He runs to my room, he wakes me up to make sure I’m okay. But she swears that this was my identical twin. There was no one else around the area, the road that she saw the other me walking on. There were just two other houses there and nothing else.

JIM HAROLD: So that was kind of a doppelganger situation, which is an interesting thing. I hear more and more of that over the years. I was familiar with the idea of doppelgangers, but I didn’t realize how much that happened, in particular with locations like you’re describing that seem to be highly haunted.

NICKI: Yeah. We had another instance. Like I said, my dad had truck drivers there. I had two adult stepbrothers and their partners that would often stay over. My younger stepbrother’s wife was staying there, and she walks to the kitchen to get a drink of water and goes past a little den area and sees my other sister-in-law sitting there, or what she thinks is my sister-in-law. She says, “What are you looking at, (expletive)?” because they didn’t get along at the time. And the other sister-in-law ignored her, so she walked to the kitchen to get a glass of water, went back to bed and didn’t think anything about it.

I guess the next day she asked my stepmom, “Why was the other sister-in-law here?” She goes, “She wasn’t here. She’s been in her house.”

JIM HAROLD: And as I understand it, you had similar experiences. You would see people there that you knew could not be there at the time.

NICKI: Yeah, absolutely. I had several instances when my stepbrothers were supposed to – I thought they were there. My younger stepbrother had a room adjacent to mine, and I would swear that I saw him walk down the hallway when he was at work. My niece stayed with me a lot, and when I was there she would make it a point to be there, too. She was like six years younger than me. She would sit up in the bed and be talking to her dad, who had a home that was several miles down the road. She’d be talking to him like he was there. Very strange.

JIM HAROLD: Wow. Just a strange place. Is the house still in the family?

NICKI: It’s not. My dad and my stepmom divorced, so she sold the home, and I haven’t heard anything. I would love to know if the new owners have had similar experiences, because we did. And actually, some other experiences we had were with my stepbrother’s young children. My brothers had little boys around the same time. I would be in my room and I would hear them – what I thought was them – crying. And they wouldn’t be there.

My niece and I, we had a pool, so we would be in and out of the house a lot, and we thought we heard my grandmother humming and singing in the laundry room. We assumed that she was there, but she wasn’t there. There were several instances where that happened, where people we thought were there were not. And just a lot of kind of scary stuff.

JIM HAROLD: Sounds like an interesting place to have spent so much time in your childhood, and it sounds like it kind of encouraged your interest in all of this.

NICKI: It really did. I was very skeptical. My dad has always been very superstitious, and that whole side of my family has had dreams that would come true and premonitions and things like that, so they were always into it. But I was very skeptical. But living in that house made me way more open to the possibility that something else exists and that we just don’t know what’s out there.

JIM HAROLD: Very, very true. Something is out there. Not sure what it is, but it’s fun having these conversations and sharing these stories. Nicki, thank you for being a part of the Campfire tonight.

NICKI: Thank you.

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JIM HAROLD: Leila is on the phone from Tennessee. We’re so glad to have her. It’s actually Zoom, it’s not the phone, but old habits die hard. But anyway, Leila’s going to take us back to when she was seven years old and a story that definitely made an impression. Leila, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us, and tell us what happened.

LEILA: Hey, Jim. Thank you for having me. So I was seven years old. My best friend had just moved to South Dakota – and of course, you’ve only been alive for six, seven years, but she was my best friend at the time, and we just felt like we were sisters. We even looked alike. Her older sister was my babysitter, and she actually was in college at the time, so she was still living in the same city as me. She was still babysitting me. There were three sisters: my friend who was my age, and then her middle sister moved with their parents to South Dakota, and the oldest one stayed and continued to babysit me.

That summer, she was like, “Hey, I’m going to South Dakota to visit my sisters.” She asked my mom if I could go with her. My mom was single at the time, so I think she was like, “Yeah, sure, take her to South Dakota.” [laughs] We went on a Greyhound bus, believe it or not, from Tennessee to South Dakota. That was a trip that was crazy in and of itself.

But when we got there, they had moved to this really small town, and they lived on top of – I mean, of course I was small at the time, but it just seemed like the most giant mountain. It looked over the whole town. You could see everything from their home on top of this mountain. It was a big windy road all the way up, and then you got there and to me it looked like a mansion. It was huge. It had three stories and a pool. It was just awesome. Every kid’s dream.

I get there and after probably not even a day, they’re telling me, “There’s ghosts, there’s ghosts.” At the time, I don’t think I had ever really understood the concept or really thought about ghosts as being anything other than just something you hear about or see on TV or in a silly ghost story. It wasn’t real. So I was like, “Oh, you’re trying to scare me. No big deal.”

Well, on the second or third night, we made a pallet on the floor, and my friend – I’ll just call her “S” – my friend S and I slept on the floor. The next morning, we woke up, and I was still lying on the floor pallet, in my pajamas, and she got up and went to her – it was a dresser / desk / bookshelf combination, so it was a very big piece of furniture.

At the very top there was a famous set of dolls that most girls know about. They all had names and books and a historical line that went along with them. She had every single doll in the collection and they were all lined up on the very, very top of the shelf, and all of the books for the dolls were lined up in front, kind of like a little barricade. Each doll was matched with their book in front of them. The dolls’ heads came right to the ceiling, and it was just the perfect amount of space for all of them right at the top.

So she’s going over to sit at her dresser / desk / bookshelf combination, and she pulls the dresser drawer out, she gets her clothes out, she closes the dresser drawer, she stands up from the bed, and she walks away. And as she does, one of the dolls flies from the middle of the shelf down and hits the bed right where she was sitting and then kind of kerplops onto the floor.

If you’re like, “Okay, it just fell,” it didn’t, because all of the books were stacked directly in front, like I said, like a little wall. Book to book to book to book, doll to doll to doll. The doll was in the middle. It couldn’t have lifted up and over the books because the books come up about halfway stacked in front of the dolls, and all the other dolls were not disturbed.

This doll that flew off the shelf happened to have the exact same name as S, which is a fluke in and of itself, and also looked exactly like her as well. So that was weird. We just paused and we looked at each other and we screamed and jumped up and ran out of the room. We went to her older sister, because she was the oldest person home at the time, and we were speaking a mile a minute. “The doll flew off the shelf and it hit the bed!” and blah, blah, blah. She said, “Okay, fine.” She gets up, she comes in the room with us, and we have to show her.

We run back into the room and the doll is not on the floor where it landed anymore. It’s now across the room, in the corner, standing, facing the corner like it’s in timeout. But it’s on the complete other side of the room.

JIM HAROLD: Oh boy.

LEILA: We were like, wait. We’d only been out of the room across the hall for just a few moments. And there is a middle sister here, but she was – I don’t know, she was 11 or 12 at the time. She was sleeping later in the day than we were. We were up early in the morning. She was still asleep in her bed. But the point is, we just ran across the hall and directly back in the bedroom. Nobody else was home. Nobody else could’ve moved the doll. It was standing against the wall, and we were like, “That’s not where it was. It landed over here and now it’s over there.”

It was enough to scare her older sister, so we immediately ran and got the middle sister, woke her up, we all got in the car and rushed to the mother’s work. She was very doting and caring to us, so sweet. We were all still in our pajamas. We stayed with her the rest of the day and didn’t go home until she could go home with us because we were so scared.

They ended up calling – and I guess I feel hesitant to say it, but they were First Nations, and they ended up calling somebody who was First Nations to come and bless the house. They did say it was actually on a burial ground, and that was probably where the haunting was derived from. And that happened while I was there. I remember it, and it was very interesting and meaningful and powerful.

I know the hauntings did continue after that as far as hearing people running up and down the hallways, seeing people, radios being unplugged repetitively. Things like that happened, but nothing aggressive ever happened again.

JIM HAROLD: Wow. Yeah, when things start flying across the room and almost hitting people, that’s when they get my attention, for sure.

LEILA: I mean, it scared the living daylights out of me. I remember I couldn’t even tell the story when I came home to my parents because my voice would shake because it scared me so badly. It wasn’t maybe even the doll falling as much as it was coming back to it being on the other side of the room, standing up in a corner facing the corner. It just seemed too scary for me, like the doll was in timeout. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: It reminds me of the Twilight Zone with the ventriloquist dummy. He puts it in the case and then he looks up and it’s sitting on the couch looking at him. That’s what it reminds me of. Well, thanks so much for being on the show. We appreciate it, and for sharing this very harrowing story of a childhood haunt.

LEILA: Yes, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

JIM HAROLD: Vanessa is back on the Campfire. You might remember a while back she was on the show. She’s calling in from Oregon. She told us a very cool story about a special guardian angel. Tonight she’s going to tell us about some mysterious footsteps. Vanessa, welcome back to the program. Seems like we just talked a few moments ago, but here we are once again.

VANESSA: Here we are.

JIM HAROLD: Please tell us this story about footsteps.

VANESSA: This was my first real experience with actually hearing anything. I had a boyfriend at the time that lived pretty much in the middle of nowhere in Northern California, and he had bought this new house. It was just lovely. The story is that a man built this house; he had his shop on the bottom, like a garage shop kind of thing, and then upstairs was the house where he lived. It was just gorgeous. It was beautiful.

I would stay there every once in a while, and every time I stayed there, he had to get up super, super early, way before me. So I would, of course, not get up that early and sleep in a little bit longer. One morning, he had left, and not too long after that – where the bedroom was, where we slept, it was the same wall as the outside steps up to the front door. You can hear everything going up and down the stairs.

I just heard very, very distinct clomping stomps up the stairs, up the stairs, up the stairs. I figured of course it was him coming back because he forgot something. We all do that. I was like, “Hey, what’d you forget?” I didn’t hear anything, didn’t hear anything, didn’t hear the door open. I was like “Okay, that’s really weird.” The door was usually not locked because this was the middle of nowhere. So I went out there, looked outside, nobody’s there.

I was really freaked out, because I’ve always felt a little something in this home, and I knew that the man who built it did pass away inside the house. But it wasn’t a bad feeling. It was just you could feel a difference in the air in the back of the house.

So okay, that was confirmation. I got out of there really, really fast. [laughs] I was freaked out. I get outside, and of course I had locked my keys in my truck. This was before cellphones. I had to go back into the house. So I went in and I literally had one foot out the front door and stretched the phone all the way out. I called my mom, who had my spares, and she came in and let me in my car. But as soon as I got off the phone, I shot back outside and I was just like, “He’s there.”

But it wasn’t anything bad. I remember one time we had a party and we were all outside and a girlfriend of mine went in to use the restroom, and she came out and she was like, “You know there’s something in that house, right?” I was like, “I kind of felt something there too,” and she’s like, “Oh yeah, he’s not bad, but he’s definitely there.” It’s like, okay, yep. I get it. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: It is a mysterious world we live in, isn’t it, Vanessa?

VANESSA: It so is. And I don’t pretend to understand it, and I don’t know what it is, but it’s so comforting to know that there is something there. I don’t know what it is or how it happens, but definitely there’s something there, for sure.

JIM HAROLD: Do you think this stepper was an actual ghost that was sentient, or do you think it was some kind of replay? What do you think about the nature of it?

VANESSA: It’s so interesting because there’s no way to know, but it could be residual. Can you imagine building this home and your shop is downstairs, and you’re going up and down those stairs so many times – and even if it wasn’t residual, his energy was still in that house for sure. So yeah, I don’t know, but it could – I mean, can you imagine, oh my gosh, how many times he went up and down those stairs working on the house? But I could also understand he put his heart and soul into that home, so I can totally understand why his energy would still be in there as well.

JIM HAROLD: It’s interesting because you think about the places that are important to you – and different people have different philosophies. Some people love their homes. It’s so much a part of their identity. My father-in-law was like that. Other people are like, “Hey, it’s just a place to hang my hat. It’s no big deal.” But to the people who really love their home or their place of work, it makes sense that there would be some kind of attachment there.

VANESSA: It really does, and I really love that thought. You put so much into something in this life, and then maybe, yeah, you still can have some effect. We talked about him. Isn’t that great? He built this house and then we still talked about him after he’s gone. I think that’s great.

JIM HAROLD: Thank you for sharing this great story on the Campfire tonight.

VANESSA: Thank you, Jim. This was great. Thank you so much.

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You’re listening to Jim Harold’s Campfire.

JIM HAROLD: Ryan, a longtime listener, is on the line from Iowa, and he has what he says is a bit of a headscratcher for us. But before we get to that, with him is his son Brayden, who is a superfan of the shows. Brayden, if you don’t mind, say hey to the folks out there.

BRAYDEN: Hey, guys.

JIM HAROLD: Brayden is a very cool kid and a big fan of the show, so to him we say, as always – stay spooky, Brayden, and thanks for all your support. Ryan, thank you for tuning in to the show and for sharing this story. You know I love headscratchers, so tell us what happened.

RYAN: All right, Jim. Hey, thanks for having me on. My story involves a dream that I had a couple of years ago. It starts out with a phone conversation that I was having with my sister a couple of months ago. She was telling me how she woke up one night and she heard the sound of this whispery, raspy voice, and it came out of nowhere. It was speaking to her in a language that she couldn’t quite understand. She said it went on for a few seconds and then it was gone.

Anyhow, my sister telling me of her experience reminded me of something that happened to myself just a couple years ago. My experience starts out as a dream, and the dream begins with me climbing a flight of stairs in my home, only for whatever reason it wasn’t my actual home, yet in the dream it was. Anyway, I’m going up these stairs that lead to the second floor bedrooms, and while going upstairs, I feel the sensation as though I was being followed. Something was coming up the stairs behind me.

I feel compelled to turn around, and when I did, what I saw when I looked behind me was this thing – it was a muscular, bare-chested man, but the disturbing part was that whatever this thing was, it had the head of a goat.

JIM HAROLD: Oh, okay, that gets my attention. [laughs]

RYAN: Now I’m backing up the stairs and I’m face to face with this thing. I’m backing up the stairs, this thing is following me, and as it comes closer and closer, I remember in my dream feeling an intense sense of dread. But then I woke up before anything could happen.

So I wake up after just having this weird dream, and I’m no longer in a dream state – I was wide awake by this point. Then, from out of nowhere, I hear this voice. It’s early in the morning, so it was dark in my room, pitch black. I couldn’t see anything, but I hear this voice that’s coming from somewhere that I couldn’t quite pinpoint. The voice was raspy and whispery and speaking in a language that I couldn’t understand, exactly like what happened to my sister.

I heard this voice for about 10 seconds or so, and then it just stopped. After experiencing this, I wake up my wife. My wife is a sweetheart, but she’s also a giant skeptic when it comes to anything that’s paranormal. I tell her what just happened to me, about the dream and the voice, but naturally she chalked it up to all being a dream. But like I said, I know that when I heard that voice, I was wide awake.

Anyway, that is my story. I don’t know what it was exactly that I heard, that creepy voice, but I feel whatever it was, it belonged to whatever it was that was following me up the stairs with the goat head in my dream. I feel like maybe something presented itself to me visually in the dream world and then audibly when I was awake. Just very bizarre.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, that’s the thing, the tieback with your sister’s story, and the fact that there was that whispery voice. If it wouldn’t have been for that, you could’ve said just a really weird dream, but then the whispery part, that’s what gets me. And I’m assuming your wife is still a skeptic?

RYAN: Oh, absolutely she is. Yep, she is. I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon.

JIM HAROLD: Well, between you and Brayden, we have plenty of spookiness in the house. She can be the level-minded skeptic giving that counterbalance. Ryan, thank you for joining us tonight and sharing this story. And of course, Brayden, stay spooky. Thank you both.

RYAN: Hey, thanks a lot, Jim.

BRAYDEN: Thank you.

JIM HAROLD: Steve is on the line, and he deserves a special salute. First of all, he’s been listening since the second or third episode of the Campfire, going back to 2009. That’s 13 years, almost. That is amazing. We thank Steve for that. And he was on a previous Campfire back in 2013. He said, “Man, you’ve got a good memory,” and I said, “No, I’ve got good recordkeeping.” [laughs] But nevertheless, we really appreciate our longtime listeners and repeat callers. Steve has a story about a family trip. Steve, welcome to the show, and please tell us what happened.

STEVE: Thanks, Jim. This happened 10 years ago. I was on a family trip with my mother, and it was both to travel around – I love road trips – but it was also to do a little research on family history. I was actually researching my father’s side of the family, and one branch had come over from Scotland and settled in the Chesapeake Bay and St. Michaels in the 17th century and become shipbuilders. There was one ancestor in particular I wanted to learn more information about.

So we went to St. Michaels. It’s a beautiful town, if you’ve never been there, and we visited the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum and learned all about the ships that they built there and how influential they were in world history. I was actually able to find the property that my ancestor lived in. There’s nothing there now; it’s just a field. But that was exciting.

It was a Sunday, so the library and the archives were closed, so we spent the night at the Tidewater Inn, which is in Eaton, a town nearby. It’s a larger town nearby. The Tidewater Inn is an old hotel. Like with old hotels, you have a smallish room, but it was very nice. We overlooked the main street of town. We had two beds and there was a settee that faced the bed.

That night, I had this terrifying nightmare. There was a woman sitting on the couch, staring at me. She was glowering at me. She was African-American, kind of disheveled, but just filled with rage. And before I knew it, she had lunged at me. She had a razor and she was attacking my face, and I was trying to fend her off, but as nightmares are, you can barely move, you can barely speak. I woke my mother up as I was trying to cry out. I’m not prone to nightmares; this rarely ever happens to me.

Anyway, I was able to go back to sleep, and I just shrugged it off as a bad dream. The next day, I went to the courthouse records and was researching this ancestor and came across a record – now, I knew that he had owned slaves. These were small shipbuilders, so it was sort of a family affair. Typically a white family, if they were middle class or making ships, would own a couple slaves. Well, I came across this record where he sold a boy of two years old. It included his name.

My blood ran cold and I thought, oh, this is really the ugly, shameful side of this family history. Then I thought, what kind of a person would sell a two-year-old? Did he separate this boy from his mother? What was going on? Anyway, I made some photocopies and I found some other information, and we got back in the car and were driving away, and then it dawned on me – this nightmare I had last night, I got this overwhelming sense that that woman was the boy’s mother and she was taking out her anger on me because I was related.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, who could blame her? You were the convenient outlet for that, the totally righteous indignation of that horrible thing.

STEVE: Yeah. If the boy was separated from his mother, I just can’t imagine how painful, how awful. What a horrible experience. I suppose it’s a bit of a headscratcher in this case, but it seemed to me to be more than a coincidence.

JIM HAROLD: Right. I’m fond of saying too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence.

STEVE: Yes, exactly.

JIM HAROLD: That’s obviously an extremely horrible chapter in our history, and a lot of us – I haven’t gone back and looked at those facts in my genealogy. I know a little bit about it, but I don’t think, that I know of, there were slave owners. I haven’t discovered any yet. But again, that’s a sad part of our history, a tragic part of our history. If you go back enough, you’re going to find somebody in your chain, if you’re of European descent, who did that awful thing.

STEVE: Exactly.

JIM HAROLD: I’ve got to believe that if there are ghosts who feel vengeance or anger, that would rightfully be channeled and it would be understandable. It’s obviously not your fault, but you could understand that anger.

STEVE: Yeah, the sins of the father kind of dynamic. If you’ve ever watched the Henry Louis Gates Jr. program on ancestry, most people of European descent, if they have settlers from the 17th century, most states had slavery back in the 17th and 18th centuries.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, a sad, sad chapter indeed. But thank you for sharing your story. Very interesting when you do the research and say, “That may have just been it.” Steve, thank you so much for being a part of the Campfire.

STEVE: Wonderful to talk to you, Jim. Thank you.

JIM HAROLD: Donna is on the line from Mississippi. If you listen to one of our other podcasts, one of our newer podcasts, You Won’t Believe What Happened To Me, Donna has already been on a couple times and has shared some great stories with us. And tonight she’s going to share a spooky story with us. Donna, welcome back to the show. Thank you for joining us, and tell us what happened.

DONNA: Thank you for having me on the show. When I was living in Texas – and I lived in a lot of states – it was the first time I ever bought a new home. I really was debating. I hemmed and hawed on certain homes within that neighborhood. Everybody kept saying, “You’re so crazy. That’s so far from downtown Austin,” and I’m like, “Yeah, that’s okay. I’d rather be a little peaceful.” So I bought in a brand new subdivision called Block House Creek. It was the newest phase of that place.

Within a few weeks of having moved in, I noticed a couple of really strange things happening. The layout of the house was like a cathedral on half of the house and then this catwalk down the center of the upstairs. That’s kind of an important thing that comes into play in this story at some point.

But what happened is I had this bathroom window upstairs, and I just loved how the light would go down into that living room. So every morning, I would open the shower curtain, and every night I would come home and the shower curtain would be closed. I’m like, okay, that’s really weird. Then I started thinking, maybe one of these workers is coming in here. Maybe they still have a key. So I called the builder and they’re like, “No, we actually key the lock just for you.” I’m like, “Okay, great.”

Noticed a few things, but then I kind of forgot about it. Didn’t go very far. About a year and a half into it, my cousin came down with her baby, and the baby was in the upstairs bedroom right next to that same bathroom. All night long, her and I were sitting chatting downstairs, and the door kept opening. We would go up there and shut the door, and the door would open. She’s like, “Something’s going on in this house. This is really weird.” I’m like, “Well, I keep it shut all the time, so I know it stays shut.”

Later on in the process – I used to travel quite a bit for work, and I had a neighbor across the street. One night we got a really bad rainstorm coming in, and he saw my front windows were open. I had beautiful window seats in the house, and he said, “I figured I’d better go over there and get them shut. Honest to God, Donna, I’ve never had this happen to me. From the second I walked in the house and up the stairs, something followed me. I could not get down those stairs fast enough. I was almost stumbling.”

So that was just a few things. Then later on, my mother came to visit, and all night long she said somebody was trying to get in the bedroom door. I’m like, “Okay, I’ve never had that happen,” but I never shut my doors.

I bought the house in ’04. In 2010, I lost one of my little dogs and I got two other dogs to replace him. It almost started happening immediately – when I would go to work, I’d have them segregated in the kitchen, and I’d come home and the dog was digging through the sheetrock to get at something it thought was in the walls. It never found anything. I had exterminators come over. It was crazy. Crazy, insane.

I never really thought much about it, and I lived there 13 years. I replaced my water heater three times in 13 years. A lot of the stuff was centered on water. Later on, in 2015, my mom had fallen, so I worked with my boss and said, “Look, I really want to go out there and make sure everything’s okay.” It was pretty serious. He’s like, “Okay.” I’m like, “I’ll go over Christmastime so then I’m losing less work time.” I got everything ready and I was leaving on the 24th of December, Christmas Eve, overnight. They were in California, I was in Texas.

I went to work on the 22nd, and I’ll never forget the date – it was crazy. I go to work, and we used to do these crazy fire drills at work. It would come very randomly and it would be like you had to race to get out the doors. I did that. And they used to bring in ice cream trucks and stuff after. That’s the Austin culture, right? So I’m sitting out there having an ice cream with a couple of friends, and all of a sudden my boss comes out and he’s like, “Donna, come here.” I’m like, “What?” He goes, “Don’t panic, don’t get upset. Just go home. Don’t speed. Just go home.” I was about five miles away from home. I’m like, “What’s going on?” He goes, “I’m not going to tell you because I don’t want you to panic.” Of course, now you’re panicking twice as much.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, I’d be doubly panicked.

DONNA: Yeah. So then I call my neighbor. She’d been such a close friend for so long, and she always took care of the dogs when I was traveling. I called her and said, “Debbie, what’s going on?” She goes, “Donna, I don’t know what to tell you, but I’ve got the dogs. That’s the most important thing. But you have water pouring out of your house through the garage. Nobody can get in there to turn off the power because it’s coming through the power panel on the wall.”

JIM HAROLD: Oh gosh.

DONNA: I go home and I’m like, “Debbie, just go next door to the guy and have him shut off the water.” So she goes over, she gets that taken care of by the time I got there. But if you could’ve seen it, you would’ve died. Upstairs you’ve got this catwalk, and all you’ve got is water flowing over continuously, and two or three inches of water in different places all on the first floor. It’s in my TV, it’s in my computer. It was like $50,000 worth of damage. That’s how much damage it was.

JIM HAROLD: Oh my gosh.

DONNA: And it was in the same bathroom where I had the strange things happening. I never really thought much about it. It was only recently when I thought about this, because everybody got – word was in the family, “This is a haunted house, don’t go there.” I started thinking about it after I left and got here to Mississippi, and I started doing some research.

Well, come to find out, that ground was very old Indian tribal land, and it was actually several nations. There were the Tonkawa, the Apaches, the Comanches. During that time, they had moved a lot of settlers in that were workers to build the railroad through there, and of course, the army came in – or whoever they were, the chiefs came in and built this Fort Tomlinson. Fort Tomlinson is Block House Creek. So they took all that land from the Indians and they built it and had all their people that were the workers and the soldiers living within that land.

Needless to say, all that land as far as I’m concerned was Indian-owned land, and when Santa Ana came in and started fighting, the rangers and everybody that was stationed up at Fort Tomlinson abandoned the post to go down and fight. And when they came back roughly a year later, it had been completely burned down and leveled by the tribes.

So yeah, I do think that has something to play in it. People that I talked to thought it was nuts. Three water heaters in 13 years is ridiculous. Something’s going on. And there was a creek there. I knew where the creek ran from where I lived, but I don’t know that that wasn’t all creek at some point. And I was the exact middle of the seven houses that were on that side of the street, and I was the highest house on the street.

JIM HAROLD: So you feel that in a way, perhaps the land was cursed because of its genesis, maybe?

DONNA: Yeah, I kind of do. I think over time, there was just a lot of things that happened in the generations, and it never really was anything until they started building this Block House Creek. It was literally farmland, and it was for years. When I moved to that town, there were only 7,000 residents in the whole place. So it was very small, and it wasn’t meant to be – I just think there was something that was left over there.

In fact, in thinking back about it, Jim, it’s quite interesting; I do recall in reading the HOA guidelines when I moved in there, there was something in there that anything you find in the ground or anything that could be historical in the ground was property of the HOA.

JIM HAROLD: Interesting. Last year I moved into a newer home for me, the newest home I’ve ever been in, and I wondered about that too. Yeah, this house isn’t very old, but this development – what was it built on? I kind of wondered the same thing. Nothing so far. It’s been a year; there’s not been any strange activity. But you never know.

DONNA: Yeah, I really never looked into it much when I was living there because I’m like, I really don’t want to know. It never hurt me. The biggest thing I ever saw was a moving shower curtain and lights that used to flash when I would get frustrated. It really wasn’t hurting me or harming me, so I never really dwelled on it. I was happy in the home, and it was in a nice location for me.

JIM HAROLD: Well, there you have it. Donna, thank you so much for joining us tonight on the Campfire and sharing this very interesting story.

DONNA: Thank you for having me on the show, Jim. You take care.

JIM HAROLD: Well, we did it again. We safely landed another edition of the Campfire. Thank you so much for listening to the show. I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope that if you do enjoy it, you will follow or subscribe on the podcast app of your choice. Also, please leave a rating and review. That would be most appreciated, too.

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