Monster In My Closet – Campfire 604

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A young man sees a monster in his closet, growing up in a haunted house, Robert The Doll and much more spookiness on this edition of Campfire!


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TRANSCRIPT

JIM HAROLD: Imagine coming face to face with a monster in your closet. It happened to one of our callers today. Stay tuned for the gripping tale on Jim Harold’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 you’re in the right place if you want to hear scary and spooky stories from people who have experienced them in real life. True stories. Could be ghosts, could be visitation of past loved ones, could be UFOs, cryptid creatures – whatever it is, they are fascinating and they are real, and we’re so glad to have you with us.

I hope that you will join me on my Campfire tour. We’re going to Pittsburgh, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston at the end of June. If you live in those areas or within driving distance, I hope you’ll check it out. That’s at jimharold.com/tour. Jimharold.com/tour. We put something together very special. Stories From Around the Campfire. It’s going to be live, it’s going to be interactive, and I hope you’ll join us.

Also, I’m going to be in Canton, Ohio, on June 3rd at the Small Town Monsters Monster Fest. You can get tickets for that at smalltownmonsters.com/stmmonsterfest. Again, that’s smalltownmonsters.com/stmmonsterfest. Scott and Forrest from Astonishing Legends are going to be there. Loren Coleman, the great cryptozoologist. Lyle Blackburn, Shannon LeGro. Really a lot of great people in cryptozoology. Soi f you’re interested in monsters, that is a great place to be. And it looks like we’re going to be doing a meetup after the event with the Astonishing Legends guys the evening of the 3rd, so that should be a lot of fun too.

I hope you check both of those things out depending on where you live at, and hope to see you soon. And now, I hope to give you some great Campfire stories that you’re really going to enjoy. Here they are.

Lance is on the line from Boulder, Colorado. What a great town! I got to go there a few years ago when I was on George Noory’s show. Just a fantastic, fantastic place. Anyhow, Lance has a story that has a Part A and a Part B, and it makes for a really amazing story. Lance, I know you’ve been listening since 2019. Welcome to the show. Tell us what happened.

LANCE: Awesome. Thank you, Jim. This story happened back in ’98 when me and my family moved into a new home. This home was built brand new, but there was a lot of history on the land. I’m originally from Nebraska. There were rumors that the Oregon Trail went through this property, and just a lot of history there. My dad and myself and everyone heard things, like horses in the night, but we didn’t keep horses on our acre of land. Anyway, there is a little bit of a history of stuff going on. And then my family has always said that I had somewhat of a sensitivity to things when I was little.

This story happened one night when my two cousins from Colorado were visiting us back home in Nebraska. We were playing a game. My brother was about three years younger, and then my two cousins have the same age as myself and my younger brother. My cousin was in the room with me and staying with me, and we had a sleepover. We had a Power Ranger tent and stuff like that. You know, eight years old, that kind of time. We were throwing toys at each other. We had a long hallway in the upstairs where we would just play around and make mischief.

We would run down the hallway and throw some toys at my brother and then we would run back, and then he would run down with our cousin, and she would throw a toy or he would. This went on for about 30 minutes, and then it started to slow down. You know, kids start to wind down and go to sleep. My cousin and I are lying in either our tent or sleeping bags or something, and we hear footsteps up the carpet, but they weren’t loud thumps. They were really quick, light steps. We heard them down the hallway. He whispered to me, “What is that?”, thinking that it was either his younger sister or my brother.

We’re looking at the door, and the foot of our bed or the area where we were lying down was facing the back of the door. It’s tale as old as time, just a scary – something you would see in a horror movie. You see this black hand that’s about three or four feet off the ground grab the door and lean over to look at us from beside the door. It was this black little creature, and it was blacker than black. It was really dark, and you could see its eyes. It had a reddish glow to them, white glow, that looked at us. And it had this weird grin.

JIM HAROLD: Ooh.

LANCE: Yeah. My cousin turns to me and he’s like, “What is that?” I was eight years old and not really exposed to a lot of these kinds of things, at least malevolent things, and I said, “I don’t know.” As soon as I said “I don’t know,” it just kind of whisked away out the door and went away.

Part B to the story, like you said – I since have moved to Colorado. I’ve had some crazy experiences as an adult. I’m familiar with things and I protect my home and cleanse my home and stuff, just given my history as a kid. I go see a psychic that my really good friend and her mom recommend, and the psychic has predicted some things. It’s just fun to do every once in a while.

We go there and she’s immediately – not attracted to me, but she seems very excited to do a reading for me. She’s like, “Your spirit guides are coming in really clear. I’m getting a lot of information from you. You’ve had experiences growing up, haven’t you?” I said, “Yes. I’ve had a mild sensitivity. I’ve seen things.” She said, “There were things that visited you when you were little, weren’t there? And sometimes they were kind of scary.” I said yes. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: [laughs] Ding-ding-ding!

LANCE: I was like, huh, that validates it. Weird that she brought this up and knew. This isn’t a story that I’ve told people. I don’t know. I’ve heard people on your podcast say that they don’t like to bring too much attention to these kinds of stories, and that’s how I’ve always felt. I don’t blast it everywhere. But she said, “Yes, when you were born into this world, your light shines a little bit brighter than some people, and there are going to be things that will visit you throughout your lifetime. Just make sure you know how to protect yourself.” Then we went into more of the reading, but that was about it.

JIM HAROLD: Wow. Did she say if this had had any impact on your life, this thing?

LANCE: I don’t think so. No, I don’t believe so. I do cleanse my home just based on – I don’t like to be bothered when I sleep. I keep plants and stuff to help protect my home.

JIM HAROLD: It reminds me of a story we had years ago – I was telling you offline – maybe like 2010-2011. It was this young woman who had gone to a family house with I think her boyfriend -t his is just off the top of my head. It was a haunted house, and a lot of weird, dramatic, poltergeisty stuff happened. They left, and I think for the next several years, weird things kept happening to her. So it did follow her, in terms of a more attachment kind of thing.

Anyway, I think this was a number of years – she was taking her son trick-or-treating and she was in this district of this small town, and there was basically a psychic storefront you’ll see from place to place. She took her kid in there to do trick-or-treat, and this old – at that point I guess this person was billing themselves as a fortuneteller or whatever – came out, and it was through the beaded curtain, kind of like a Central Casting, and the woman said, “Dear, you have a very nasty spirit attached to you.” And the whole cleansing and stuff. But that was a situation where she had an attachment that actually followed her and I guess impacted her in a negative way. So, good that that didn’t happen to you.

LANCE: Yeah, hopefully. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: That is wild. Again, people pooh-pooh psychics and say there’s nothing to it; I say this. I think it’s like a lot of other things in life. I think there are people who are the real deal and I think there are people who are frauds. I think I’ve run into people who are the real deal multiple times. Things that they said about my wife, for example – Carol Obley is one. She said some things about my wife when my wife called in. Didn’t know it was my wife, and she hit on the death of a friend from high school that was just jaw-dropping. Everybody wants to say, “Why don’t they play the lottery? Why don’t they go to the horse race?” or whatever. It’s like, eh, come on, it doesn’t work like that.

LANCE: It doesn’t work like that, yeah.

JIM HAROLD: But I do believe there is something to psychic phenomena, like anything else. If you go buy a car, you’ve got to be buyer beware and you’ve got to watch what you’re doing, but I think there’s certainly something to psychics. Absolutely.

LANCE: I agree.

JIM HAROLD: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it, Lance. A great story. Wow. What do you think it was? Do you have any theories as to what it was?

LANCE: I did ask the psychic what she thought it was, and she just said there’s sometimes spirits that come and go, and as they’re coming through – the way she quoted it was “you’re kind of like a lit match in a dark room full of moths.” She said sometimes they can see you and they just want to check you out.

JIM HAROLD: There you go. Well, Lance, thank you for being a part of the Campfire.

LANCE: Thank you, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: Up next on the Campfire is Kirsten. She’s been listening for a few years and she’s calling in today from Maryland. We’re so glad to speak with her. She’s going to take us back to her teenage years. I think this is going to be really, really a very interesting story because she saw something very unique – and she wasn’t the only one. Kirsten, thanks for your loyal listenership and please tell us what happened.

KIRSTEN: Hi, Jim. My story starts when I was 13 years old. We were having Easter dinner at my grandmother’s house. To put things in perspective, my grandmother lived next door to me, so I was a pretty fortunate child growing up. We had Easter dinner and about 30 family members came down, and my cousins. There were about five of us. We all just loved getting together and hanging out.

Well, as the evening started to wind down – everybody had eaten dinner, the adults were inside playing cards – we kids would like to go outside and run amuck and play kickball in the dark. So we were out playing, and somebody says, “Oh, look at all those lights up there on the hill.” About a good 600 feet away, we could see an ambulance at this local establishment. We live in the country, so anything like that is a big excitement. He said, “Hey, what’s that? Let’s go see what it is.” We go to the edge of my grandmother’s property and we’re standing at the road, and we’re looking up 600 feet away and we could see ambulances and all that happening.

Then my youngest cousin, who had to have been about eight years old, says, “Hey guys, who’s that?” We were looking, like, “What?” He’s like, “Over in front of Grandmother’s house.” We look, and there’s this beautiful – I mean, the most gorgeous white I’ve ever seen, just totally luminous. It was a person in a dress. Now, usually people walk, and you can see their weight shift back and forth. Well, they were gliding. You couldn’t see any legs. You could just see this specter, gliding in front of my grandmother’s house. It was beautiful. It was absolutely beautiful. It was breathtaking.

All we could see was a dress. We could see hair. We couldn’t really see the arms or legs, which was kind of strange. We just thought maybe we were far away. Being the oldest cousin, I said, “Hey, who’s that?” And it didn’t stop. It kept moving. Really slowly, but gliding. I said, “Hey! You’re on my grandma’s property. Who are you?” When I said that, they turned around and it didn’t have a face. It was absolutely terrifying. There were five of us; no one said anything. Everybody just took off running. We ran to my house. You could just hear feet pattering. Because we had a dirt driveway, you could hear rocks kicking up as we’re running, not looking to the side, to my house.

Jim, we got in our house and everybody’s talking about what that was. “What was that?” “Oh my goodness, did you see that?” “Oh my God, how are we going to get back to Grandma’s house?” I said, “I’ll tell you what, I’ll call over there and I’ll see if somebody can come get us.” I call over, and my brother comes over and he’s like, “What’s going on, guys?” We’re like, “We saw a ghost, we saw a ghost!” [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: The thing is, it wasn’t just you. It was a group of people.

KIRSTEN: It was five of us. And we can all tell you the same story to the day. It was scary. It didn’t have a face. How do you explain that? So we get to my grandmother’s house and everyone can tell that we’re really shaken up, and we say, “Did anybody go outside? Has anybody been outside lately?” Like I said, we were in the country. We didn’t have neighbors. They said, “No, we’ve all been down here playing cards. Nobody’s been outside.” We tell them what we’ve seen, and they’re just like, “Oh, okay. Yeah.” That should’ve scared us or made us think, because they had seen things there when they were kids as well.

JIM HAROLD: So how has that impacted over the years for you? How has that changed your perception of the paranormal and so forth?

KIRSTEN: It has definitely changed me, Jim, because I know that there are things out there that have no reasoning. There’s things out there that we can’t explain. I’ve told this story multiple times – I’m 43 now, so that’s 30 years, and every time I tell the story I get goosebumps. This was on my property, so I had to live with that, knowing there’s something out there. It didn’t have any ill intent, but I got its attention. It turned around slowly. I couldn’t explain what I saw.

But just to let you know, Jim, 20 years later, we’re having Thanksgiving dinner and we’re all telling ghost stories, and my dad said, “Yeah, like the time those kids saw that ghost – there was an accident, and the young woman in that accident died. It very well could’ve been her.”

JIM HAROLD: That was going to be my question, if there was a connection. It sounds like there was. My goodness. And the family had seen other things. Was there anything unique about the property or anything you think lent itself to that?

KIRSTEN: I don’t know, Jim. I know the area that we live in – it’s Southern Maryland, and this area has a lot of rich history with the Civil War. It was a Civil War camp here, and a lot of soldiers died under horrible conditions. Maybe our property – because I know several stories that I could tell you, a couple secondhand. My dad’s house has always – I had things happen with an entity in my house that I have pushed out of my brain. I couldn’t tell you the stories, but I can tell you how I felt.

JIM HAROLD: Wow. Well, Kirsten, thank you for sharing a very memorable story, and please come back on the show if you have any other stories that come to mind that you would like to share. Thank you so much for being a part of the Campfire.

KIRSTEN: Thank you, Jim. Stay spooky!

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If you love the Campfire, be sure to check out the Paranormal Podcast, where every week Jim interviews experts and authors about strange mysteries. Find it for free wherever you listen to this podcast. Tune in to the Paranormal Podcast today. Now, we return to Jim Harold’s Campfire.

JIM HAROLD: Next up is Summer from Colorado. She is a newer listener, and we’re so glad that these found us. We really appreciate it. She said she’s loving it so much, the next step is the Plus Club, and that would be great. We appreciate that. She’s going to talk to us about a sleep paralysis / astral projection story. That topic – I would love to do more stories on projection because that is fascinating to me, absolutely fascinating. Summer, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us, and tell us what happened.

SUMMER: Thank you for having me. I guess I’ll start by saying I have always experienced sleep paralysis ever since I can remember. It wasn’t till maybe early adulthood that I even put a name to it or thought about it twice. So always had that reoccurring sleep paralysis, that feeling of being terrified and frozen, not knowing what’s going on, and trying to force yourself to wake up. Every time I would have these sleep paralysis dreams, it would always feel like a presence was coming, but I never saw anything.

Fast forward to in my early twenties, me and my best friend Debbie, who is a key player in my story as well, we were just chatting about it and we figured out that both of us have always had sleep paralysis. Just something funny, but we always talked about it. I lived in Tennessee at the time, and me and Debbie decided to move in together. She lived in Florida, so I moved to Florida. She was staying with her parents at the time, so I moved into her parents’ house and we shared a room.

The first part of this story comes in there. One night, we were settling down to bed and I fell asleep first, and I ended up having a sleep paralysis incident. It was a little different than my normal sleep paralysis. This time, I could see everything around me, which is normal, see everything how it is when you’re sleeping, but this time I could see Debbie next to me – but she was looking at me, and she started talking to me.

Right then and there, I could tell this wasn’t Debbie. This was something pretending to be Debbie, which is terrifying.

JIM HAROLD: Kind of a doppelganger.

SUMMER: Right, kind of a doppelganger, and I’d never had that, somebody speaking to me during a sleep paralysis experience. I don’t remember what she was saying or anything like that. She was just speaking to me, and I stopped her and I said, “You’re not Debbie.” That made it angry, and I shouted again, “You’re not Debbie!”, pushed it off the bed and stomped it, and I woke up. That ended the dream there.

JIM HAROLD: Wow. So you stomped this doppelganger or whatever it was. Wow.

SUMMER: Yes. And then I didn’t have another sleep paralysis experience for two years after that.

JIM HAROLD: I have to ask you a question before we move on to the next chapter: did you tell Debbie about this?

SUMMER: I did. She’s always believed me since we’ve both had similar experiences, and she said she did see me on the bed kind of twitching and trying to speak. So she saw it physically of just me having that experience, of me trying to get words out to wake myself up.

JIM HAROLD: Wow. So tell us what happened two years later.

SUMMER: Went two years without a sleep paralysis experience, which is crazy because I’d never gone that long before then. Fast forward two years, me and Debbie are living together, renting a place together, and we have one more roommate, Steve. I had been having worse and worse sleep paralysis in the weeks leading up to this. It was like the worst it’s ever been, just getting more and more intense.

I did some research and came upon you can sage cleanse your house, which I tried. But being honest, I didn’t do a very thorough job of it. I just kind of didn’t really know what I was doing and didn’t thoroughly do it. So the night that I did the very, let’s say, half-assed sage cleanse, I had the most intense experience of my life with the sleep paralysis, and it turned into astral projection.

I went through the sleep paralysis steps, but this time I was outside of my body. I wasn’t just frozen in bed; I was actually outside of my body and started moving around the room. I could sense something very wrong. It felt like something was coming, and that’s always how it’s felt, but it felt like tonight was the night where something was coming. I was in a panic. I ran around the house trying to get both our roommate Steve and Debbie to wake me up.

So I ran into Steve’s room first. I could see his door was cracked. For some reason my cat and dog were with him and not me, which that never happened before. They’ve always slept with me. So my cat and dog were in his room. I could see him lying there, on his phone. I was screaming at him in this astral body, screaming at him to try to wake me up. Of course, he didn’t hear me, didn’t notice anything. So I ran to Debbie’s room. I could see her sitting on her bed with her boyfriend at the time, talking, and I tried the same thing. I screamed at them to please go wake me up because I was terrified. And of course, they couldn’t hear me or see anything. But I even went into her bathroom and saw a cup of water on the counter that I tried to knock over. I’m just giving you these details because when I told them later, they corroborated all the details were exactly how I saw them, down to the same cup and everything.

I was like, “Okay, I can’t get them to wake me up, so I’m going to try to wake myself up.” I run back to my room and the presence has arrived. The only way I can describe this presence is just a big black void, a big black shape. It gave me the worst feeling of terror. It physically fought with me for a while. I yelled at it that I had God on my side and that I wasn’t scared, and it roared at me full volume and threw me against the wall.

JIM HAROLD: Oh my.

SUMMER: And then I woke up. Once I hit the wall, I woke up. After that, I went back to sleep and didn’t have another incident. In the morning, I talked about it with both my roommate Steve and Debbie, and they, like I said, corroborated all the details of what I saw was correct. I told them all about it. They believed me, and I asked them if they would help me do a full sage cleansing all together where we all take it very seriously and do every corner of the house and do it correctly. And luckily they were on board and they fully believed in it, so we did this full sage cleanse of the house, and I have not had an experience since. And that’s been eight years now.

JIM HAROLD: Wow, what a story. That’s amazing. The doppelganger, and then when you said you had God on your side and this thing roared and threw you across the room – that is amazing.

SUMMER: Yes, it’s terrifying.

JIM HAROLD: Why do you think it started? Do you have any theories?

SUMMER: Of course, I don’t know anything really, but my theory – what I’ve noticed is it starts happening more in times of mental stress. Both of these periods of time, I was in a darker place mentally. Just more stressed about life. I kind of think it’s like a manifestation of my mental health, almost. Either that or when I am mentally in a dark place, I’m more susceptible to whatever it is. Those are my two theories.

JIM HAROLD: Very interesting. Summer, thank you for joining us today on the Campfire.

SUMMER: Thank you.

JIM HAROLD: A note before our next call. We typically don’t do trigger warnings on this show because honestly, my thought is if you’re tuning in to a show about the supernatural and ghosts, there could be some frightening things. But this next topic touches on miscarriage, and it’s a very sensitive and personal story, as I say in the intro to it. But I just wanted to mention it because if you’ve been impacted by this in your life, I want to give you a heads up that that is the topic of this next story. thank you.

Anna is on the line from New Jersey. She’s a new listener, and she has something she’d like to share with us. It’s a very personal and poignant story. Any time someone shares a story like this, I really appreciate it because I’m sure it can be very touch to recount, but it’s something she feels people need to know, and I think she has a good point there. Anna, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us, and tell us what happened.

ANNA: Thank you, Jim. I’m really excited. I wanted to tell this story because I’m hoping that any other woman who’s gone through this will find comfort the way that I did. It actually happened in 1994. I was separated from my then-husband. I realized that I was pregnant. Totally unexpected, obviously. But unfortunately it wasn’t meant to be, and I lost the baby.

During my recovery, I lay down one afternoon, and – I know that I wasn’t dreaming, but I saw my grandparents, who both had passed already, walking towards me. My grandfather had a stroke in the early ’70s and he had lost the use of his right arm, but he had his right arm around my grandmother. And my grandmother was holding a baby. I couldn’t see the baby, but it was in a white blanket.

They were walking towards me; I was stunned and I kept thinking in my head, “Am I really seeing what I’m seeing? Is this really them? How can they be here? They’re both gone!” The other odd thing I noticed was that my grandmother was holding the hand of a little girl. I have no idea who this little girl is or was, but I can see her perfectly, dressed in a green plaid dress, and she had a white peplum over the top of her dress. She was sucking on a finger. I still don’t know who she was.

The next thing I remember, I was looking down at the baby in my grandmother’s arms, and I heard my grandmother say to me, “You can open this.” And I said, “No. I don’t want to open this,” because I had had a miscarriage, and everybody says sometimes it happens because there’s something wrong with the baby, and I didn’t want that image in my mind, because I still didn’t really believe that this was going to be a good thing. She said it to me again. “Go ahead and open it.” The blanket was folded so that the edge of the blanket was over the baby’s face, and I could see the end of it.

I touched it and went to pick it up, and I swear it was the softest thing I’ve ever felt in my life. Pure snow white. I lifted up the blanket, and the baby’s face was in there. My grandparents didn’t really say anything else to me after that, but somehow it was communicated to me that it was a girl. She looked up at me, a newborn baby, and she was just so beautiful. I was so happy that my grandparents were taking care of her because she didn’t come here with me, and that she was okay with them. It just gave me so much comfort.

The next thing that happened, I kind of woke up and I did that thing like, “Did that really seriously just happen to me? Did I dream that?” It didn’t feel like a dream. Actually, listening to your show, I think that it might’ve been a lucid dream. I think that’s what you’ve called them in the past. But I’m so grateful that they brought that to me, because it was such an awful time in my life, and I feel such comfort still, knowing that my baby was there with my grandparents and that they’re okay, and more importantly, that she’s okay and being looked after until I get there. That happened on March 4th of 1994 that I lost the baby.

JIM HAROLD: Wow. First of all, I’m very sorry. Secondly, that’s very powerful. People will say, “Eh, it’s just a dream”; you weren’t especially thinking of your grandparents or anything, were you?

ANNA: No, I wasn’t. Absolutely not. And they had both been gone for a while.

JIM HAROLD: Right. You said your grandfather had the use of his arm that had been paralyzed when he had a stroke in the early ’70s. Did they look younger? Did they look about the same? Did they look healthy? What did they look like, as best you can remember? This is almost 30 years ago.

ANNA: I do actually remember. My grandfather definitely looked younger. I don’t know if he was as young as he was in 1972 when he had the stroke, but I know what he looked like in 1990 when he died, and he did not look like that. He definitely was younger. My grandmother looked the same as I remember her. She passed in 1974, so I was pretty young when she died. But I definitely thought she looked young. And she was already dressed. She always had her hair done and the makeup on, and she was beautiful. She definitely looked younger and healthy.

JIM HAROLD: That’s what I’ve always heard. When you see people in these – you can call them lucid dreams or visitations or whatever you want – that they tend to look like they’re very healthy. They’re in the prime of life, they’re doing well. I fully believe that that was a communication from them. I do.

ANNA: Me too.

JIM HAROLD: Every question I was going to ask, you answered ahead of time. I was going to say, does it give you hope that you’ll be reunited? Obviously it does, as well I think it should.

ANNA: Absolutely, yeah.

JIM HAROLD: As sad as it is in many ways, that was a gift. You got to see your daughter.

ANNA: It was definitely a gift, and I’m so grateful that they were able to do that for me. I just wish that I knew who that other little girl was. I have no idea. I’ve had a couple of cousins who’ve had miscarriages. I don’t know if that little girl belonged to them. I don’t know of anybody in my family who lost a little girl that young. It’s a mystery.

JIM HAROLD: Well, life is made of mysteries, but mysteries like this one really make a lifetime impression on all of us.

ANNA: They certainly do.

JIM HAROLD: I think it’s sad but yet a great thing, both at the same time. Thank you so much for being a part of the Campfire today and sharing this very personal story.

ANNA: Thanks. Stay spooky!

JIM HAROLD: Next up we have a return caller. Brian from California is here. I love to hear visitation stories, and Brian has one for us. Brian, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us today, and tell us what happened.

BRIAN: Awesome. Thanks, Jim. Appreciate you, and I love your show.

JIM HAROLD: Thank you.

BRIAN: I was taking a nap on a Saturday afternoon. I wasn’t quite asleep yet, and I heard my wife open up the bedroom door. I heard her footsteps as she approached me. I’m like, I’m just going to be asleep and not wake up, or just not notice, or act like I’m resting. As she approached, she covered me, and then she kissed my cheek and she left the bedroom. I’m thinking, oh my gosh, that was so sweet.

The next day, I said, “Oh my gosh, honey, that was so nice. Thank you so much.” She’s like, “What are you talking about?” I’m like, “Cheri, you came in, you covered me, and then you kissed my cheek. I thought that was so sweet.” She’s like, “No I didn’t.” It wasn’t her. So we came to the determination, because Cheri’s mother has visited often, that it was Peggy that visited, Cheri’s mom.

JIM HAROLD: So your mother-in-law. Why would she give you a kiss on the cheek?

BRIAN: I mean, family. But yeah, I felt it, I knew it was there, and I could’ve sworn that it was my wife. That was just bizarre. We’ve had another instance as well that was interesting.

JIM HAROLD: Go ahead.

BRIAN: My wife and I had COVID at the outset of COVID and we were both just knocked out for about a couple weeks. One of those weeks, we were lying down and I looked over at my wife and I noticed that her index finger was moving. I’m like, that’s kind of a weird thing to do in your sleep. I thought for sure that wasn’t ordinary. So I said, “Mom, if that’s you, stop.” And the finger stopped moving. Then I said, “Okay Mom, if it is you, go ahead and move that finger again.” And right when I said that, the finger started moving again.

We also oftentimes hear footsteps as well in our house. We just know that she’s here taking care of us, and I know that she’s here watching over us. We’re grateful for that.

JIM HAROLD: I was about to say, it sounds like it’s something that you actually welcome. Right?

BRIAN: Absolutely. We know that she’s there, that she’s watching over us. It was over a decade ago when she passed away, but we still feel her presence at times. Not all the time, but those are two of the times that stand out the most.

JIM HAROLD: That’s one of the things I like to get out there about Campfire in our discussions. Sometimes it can be really scary, like, “Oh, that dark menacing figure visited me at night” or different kinds of spooky stories. And I believe those exist. I think there are more sinister energies. But I also believe there’s the other side of the supernatural that’s reaffirming, that builds our faith that we go on and makes us reconnect with those who have passed. I think that’s a big part of the picture. So I know spooky sells, but sometimes it’s nice to have these reaffirming messages. Brian, thank you so much. I know you’ve been on the show before. Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your story with us.

BRIAN: My pleasure, Jim. Stay spooky.

JIM HAROLD: Stay spooky!

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Subscribe or follow Jim Harold’s Campfire today wherever you get your podcasts. Please rate and review, too. It helps so much. Thanks! Now, back to another great Campfire story.

JIM HAROLD: Flower is on the line from New Mexico, and we’re so glad to have her on the show. She says she’s been listening to our Jim Harold shows since 2006. That is amazing. I absolutely love it. Flower, thank you so much for joining us. I know you’re going to take us back to when you were five or six years old, and I’m always fascinated to hear these very personal childhood stories. Tell us what happened.

FLOWER: All right, Jim. Thank you for having me. I’m actually leaning back to my memory here. I was about five or six years old, maybe in between. I was staying with a few cousins of mine while my mom was working. She used to manage a bar back in the day, so I was being babysat. I had just, out of the blue, woken up, and I noticed this greenish light. I wasn’t sure if it was coming from the lights from the back of the bar or what have you. But I do know that there was just this eerie feeling that I got. I happened to look outside of the window, and at the time my cousin and I were sleeping on the top bunk of the room that I was staying in. I had this drawing feeling to go and check it out.

So I climbed over my cousin – she was like, “What are you doing? Where are you going?” I was trying to point out to her that I was just sensing this weird feeling. So I climbed off of the bunk bed and I just carried on. I had this feeling to go and explore. I went around the Playskool artistic things, all the toys that were in my room, and made my way to the living room. What I noticed is there was this translucent fog that was coming around with that green hue, just making its way from the outside – from my perspective now as an adult, I’d say it’s the north side of the trailer that we were in.

I’m following it and my cousin’s like, “What exactly are you following?” I said, “I have no idea.” But then she started noticing that I was acting a little strange, is the way that she put it. I noticed it was staring to develop. It was molding itself into a form. I think she caught on because she was trying to pull me back, because I was trying to get through the front door. But before I even got there, I was looking at a crack from the curtains that were there, and that’s how I noticed it. I started thinking to myself, “I don’t know, I’m just curious.”

I guess she might’ve seen something before I did, because then she blocked the curtain and she was like, “Go to bed, go to bed.” Sure enough, being the rebellious little kid that I was, I went around her, jumped onto the couch, and I ended up looking outside of the window. All I remember is that all of a sudden, this translucent fog was actually shaping itself in the form of a rocking chair with an old lady.

JIM HAROLD: Oh my gosh.

FLOWER: I don’t know if there was a connection or what happened, but it was like our eyes locked and she smiled while the rocking chair in essence was rocking back and forth.

JIM HAROLD: Oh man. Do you have any theories who it could’ve been?

FLOWER: Well, that’s kind of the best part. She has not confirmed it for me because she refuses to talk about it – about give or take maybe three, four, maybe five years later, I was actually at my cousin’s home and I was playing with her brother, and we were playing tag or something along those lines. It just so happened that I ran into one of those big box ’80s TVs from back in the day. And when I ran into it, it ended up dropping several photos, but there was one in particular that was face-down. I picked it up; I didn’t want to get in trouble. I just happened to look at it, and she looked so familiar. My cousin Michael is like, “Oh man, you don’t want to break that picture. That’s my great-grandma.” I’m like, “What?” He’s like, “Yeah, it’s Great-Grandma Cecilia.” I’m like, oh my God. Which was my dad’s grandmother.

JIM HAROLD: So your great-grandmother.

FLOWER: My great-grandmother. But the thing is, I had never met her. She passed away the year before he was born, and he’s a year older than me. So she passed away like two years before I was born.

JIM HAROLD: So you think that figure you saw was your great-grandmother.

FLOWER: That is the presumption.

JIM HAROLD: Wow, that’s pretty neat. I guess in one way, something that could be frightening when it happens, later on it can be reassuring once you get further clarity on it.

FLOWER: That’s something I’ve carried with me this whole time, and I’ve held on to that. It was a turbulent childhood, so it was nice to feel like she was actually watching over me.

JIM HAROLD: That is cool. And it’s cool when she smiled at you. That to me is further verification it was someone who had an interest in you, someone who loved you, someone who was close to you. And then to get a verification with that photograph, that is just fantastic. And I’m assuming – you’ve been listening for years, so it sounds like that may have had an impact on you and had you be very interested in other people’s stories, right?

FLOWER: Absolutely. It’s definitely contributed to not only my sense in believing in the paranormal, but beyond that, my spirituality and really leaning into that and gaining strength from that in every regard as much as possible.

JIM HAROLD: Once again, so glad to speak with you, Flower. Thank you for listening for all these years, and thank you for sharing this very special story with us today on the Campfire.

FLOWER: Thank you.

JIM HAROLD: You might remember a while back, Amy from Georgia was on the line, and she told us about this remarkable story of this spirit that bothered her at night, and she kind of kicked its butt, so to speak. Well, she’s back, and she’s going to tell us about growing up in a haunted house, which I wonder if that is connected in any way. Amy, welcome back to the show. Love that story you told us a while back. Tell us this one about this haunted house.

AMY: Thank you for having me, Jim. I grew up in a house – we moved there when I was in about fifth grade – that had a lot of strange happenings right from the get-go. When we moved into the house, it was a very small two-bedroom, one floor. My uncle, who we bought the house from, was doing some renovations for us. He was converting the attic into bedrooms. He was a contractor. So he had cut the hole for the staircase in the far end of the kitchen, in the middle of the house. It was a very steep staircase going upstairs.

I was about sixth grade. This was probably around 1990-ish, around there. So there’s a hole in the middle of the ceiling for the staircase, if you can imagine what this would look like, and he had the stringers up but not really a useable staircase yet. It wasn’t really something you would actually go upstairs with. It was just the very beginning of the project. So there’s no floor upstairs either, because it was just attic space before that.

My family was having a cookout in the backyard, and – I’ll never forget it – I had gone back in the house to get ketchup and mustard for the cookout. When I got to the kitchen, I heard, as clear as if they were in the room with me, two children playing, and I heard the sound of a little girl saying, “Billy, I want to play jacks now.” You could hear the ball bounce, you could hear the collecting of the metal jacks. It was very clear noises, very clear what they were doing, and it came from upstairs. Remember, there’s no floor up there. There had never been a floor up there because they had just cut the hole through the ceiling. There was no clear way to get up the stairs at this point.

Of course, I was sixth grade, I completely freaked out and ran outside and told my parents. They had already started to hear things in the house, so they believed me. We always believed each other when we would tell the stories. That was the first one. That was probably the one that really let us know “there’s definitely something in this house besides us.”

At one point, after the upstairs was completed, I had turned the corner to go up the stairs from the kitchen, and at the very top of the stairs I saw this little white dog sitting at the top of the stairs. It was like a little fuzzy – like a Cairn Terrier type look, but it was white with little pokey, sticky-up ears. It just sat there and was looking down the stairs at me. We did not own a dog like that, so I was like, “Oh my goodness, there’s something in the house.” So I turned the corner to go back to the kitchen and I turned back around to look and it was gone. We only saw that the one time.

My brother one night – the way the bedrooms were set up, when you came directly up the staircase, there were no doors because the attic space was short. There was no room to put a door with the slanted ceilings. So his room was directly at the top of the stairs with no door, and then you turn a very sharp left-hand turn to go back towards my and my sister’s bedroom. My brother said one night at about four o’clock in the morning, he saw a man walk up the stairs, turn the corner, and go into my and my sister’s bedroom.

JIM HAROLD: Whoa.

AMY: He thought it was my dad, but he thought the man was wearing one of those trapper hats, like the fur hats that has the covering over the ears and the flap that comes up – he was wearing one of those and a thick flannel jacket, and my dad doesn’t have a hat like that. So he was confused about it. When he asked my dad the next day, “Did you come upstairs to say goodbye to use before you went to work?”, my dad was like, “No, I didn’t have time. I was in a rush this morning.” My brother asked him if he had a hat like that and he didn’t. So it definitely wasn’t my dad. We don’t know who it was. It was just a man that came up the stairs and turned the corner.

JIM HAROLD: That’s weird.

AMY: My brother said it was a very clear form of a person, though. It didn’t look like an apparition. My brother and I also were walking in the backyard one day – it was a hot summer day, no wind blowing, nothing out of the ordinary. We had a very long, thin – it was about an acre, a very long, thin backyard. We were walking towards the back, and we felt a sudden temperature change. It went from being a hot day to probably 40-50 degrees. It was like we stepped over a line and we both felt it at the same time. We were walking side by side and we walked through this line and we looked each other like, “Did you feel that? It’s cold here.”

We stepped back and it was warm again. We stepped forward and it was cold. It was very odd. We were both like, “This is really weird.” We just kept walking, and it was cold all the way back to the end of the fence line. We didn’t see anything, we didn’t feel anything except the temperature change. But it was a very clear difference, and it wasn’t a wind. It was just hot summer day to like 40-50 degrees. It was very, very odd.

We had items in the house that would disappear. We had a calculator once that disappeared for months. Then we came home from being gone one day, the whole family, and it was sitting on the kitchen table and the little solar panel portion was broken. We were like, “That definitely wasn’t there when we left, and here it is reappeared and it’s broken.”

There were things that would happen in the kitchen, like one night we were all in the living room watching television and we heard from the kitchen a bowl fall on the floor. It didn’t sound like a bowl just fell – if a bowl falls, it’s going to spin and come to a stop. It didn’t sound like that; it sounded like it had just clunked to the floor. We went in the kitchen and it was sitting in the middle of the floor, about eight feet from the countertop. And it was sitting upright. There’s no way it could’ve fallen that way and not made a sound.

We would come home sometimes from being out and the stereo would be blasting country music. We didn’t listen to country music, so it’s not a station we would’ve had already preprogrammed on our stereo. It would just be blasting this country music, and we would have to turn it off. It would happen several times a month. We would come home and the stereo was on.

I had friends that would not spend the night at my house. This stuff happened. My parents just moved out of this house probably five or six years ago. They lived in it for over 30 years. I had friends in high school that would not spend the night at my house because of the strange things they felt while they were there or stories I had told them.

One night my friend was over and she was sitting on the bed next to me. We were both sitting back against the head of the bed and we were playing Scrabble. We were trying not to move the bed so that the board wouldn’t move and our pieces wouldn’t move, and we both saw – we didn’t see a person or a form of anything, but we saw on the end of the bed – a depression appeared at the end of the bed as though someone had sat on it. We both looked at each other like, “You’re seeing this, right?” I was like, “Yep, I’m definitely seeing it. There’s someone sitting there.” We didn’t feel anything ominous; there was no presence in the room. We just saw the depression of something sitting there, and then a few minutes later the depression went away. You could feel the bed move when they sat down, and you felt it when they got back up, and then it was gone. It was just so strange.

JIM HAROLD: Did you learn anything about the history of the house? Who lived in it, maybe some clues to those people you saw – the kids playing jacks, the lumberjack guy/trapper guy?

AMY: We didn’t, no. The guy that came upstairs that my brother saw happened after an old man neighbor of ours had died, and we wondered if maybe it was him at the time, just coming to check. He and his wife were very friendly people. We just wondered if it was maybe him. But no clear sign that it would’ve been him. I think my brother would’ve recognized if it was him, but he also just saw him as he was turning going into the back part of the house.

There were just very strange things like that all the time. My sister would see things. A lot of things happened in my room for some reason. A lot of activity happened in my room with my things. But one night, I felt an icy cold finger run down my cheek, almost like if you were to bend your finger – not the tip of your finger, but if you would touch a baby’s cheek with the top part of your knuckle, it was almost like that. It went straight down my cheek like this, but it was like ice on my cheek. It was the strangest thing.

There was definitely something in the room with me. I felt things. I never felt alone in that house. My mom has video – years after I moved out, she sent me an iPhone video of a red solo cup in the living room moving in a really unnatural arc. It had fallen over on its side and it was moving in an arc. It would move over and then move back and then move over and move back a little bit, but the arc was shifting, almost like someone was on the floor moving it, like if a child was playing with a cup and moving it. This went on for like 15 minutes. She was up in the middle of the night with insomnia and videotaped this cup moving in a very unnatural way.

JIM HAROLD: Did any of this follow you or your parents after you moved out of the house?

AMY: It did not. I never felt anything after I left that house. I haven’t personally felt anything. My son had an experience once when I was pregnant with my youngest daughter. My husband was deployed; he was in Afghanistan. My son was sleeping. He was around two. He was sleeping in bed with me, and he stood up on the side of the bed one night like he was talking to something standing next to the bed, having a very clear conversation.

I couldn’t understand all of what he was saying, but he was around two, so if you can imagine a two-year-old standing on an adult’s bed, they’re going to be about eye level. He was looking straight ahead of him, talking to something for a very long time. And then as the conversation went, he got more and more – it seemed like he was afraid of whatever it was, and he was saying, “You’re mean, you’re mean, leave,” and all of a sudden he looked up into the corner and then he turned around to me and said, “Mommy, that was a mean lady. She flew away.”

JIM HAROLD: Oh man.

AMY: I was like, oh my goodness, I hate that. [laughs] Hate it so much. But that’s the only other thing that’s happened. Other things happened to my parents while they were there, but not since they’ve left. The rest of us have been unbothered.

JIM HAROLD: That old lady that bothered your son should know better, because based on your first story, you don’t mess around with Amy or she’ll kick spiritual butt. Amy, thank you so much for being a part of the show, and stay spooky.

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

JIM HAROLD: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. You know, so much in our lives – and I’m guilty of it, too – I spend a lot of time on other people and other things. That’s very important, to spend time on other people or time on your work, for example. I’m very guilty of that; I spend a lot of time on my work. Maybe not as much time as I should on myself. It’s so easy to get caught up in what everyone else needs from you or what your job needs from you and never take a moment to think about what you need from yourself. I think that’s so important. I always try to remind myself, if I’m not there for myself, then I’m not going to be able to help anybody else. I’m not going to be able to do work on the shows. None of that’s going to happen unless I take care of myself.

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You’re listening to Jim Harold’s Campfire.

JIM HAROLD: Next up we have another podcaster with his own paranormal stories, his own campfire stories. I’m talking about Phil over at Unexplained Inc., where the unknown connects with the empowered. He’s going to tell us about the show, but first, he’s got two – count ’em, two! – campfire stories for us. Phil, thank you so much for being on the show. I really enjoyed being on Unexplained Inc. And you mentioned you have a couple of campfire stories, so I said, “Come on over and let’s here them!” So tell us what happened.

PHIL: First off, thank you, Jim, for allowing me to come on this segment. I’m one of many podcasters who have a paranormal show who have not had a lot of crazy experiences that we’re still trying to chase after, but I have two small experiences which I think you and the listeners will appreciate. They both somewhat relate to the podcast.

Story #1 is of the paranormal route. I used to have a segment on Unexplained Inc. called The Case Study. The Case Study was a special show I did once a month. First it was with me, and then secondly it was with my good friend who’s also a big movie buff, and her name is Angel Card Amy. Amy is also a psychic medium in training. She’s still trying to hone her abilities and get everything down. She has some pretty strange and odd things happen at her place. But once again, that doesn’t directly affect me, so I won’t get into those.

Where it does affect me is this. In November of 2020, we recorded a Case Study together you see the current setup here in my room with the monitor and all this, Jim; I was on a fraction of a shoestring budget in 2020 when I first started the show, so I used to have my recording setup at the kitchen table of my apartment. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: Hey, I started with a $40 headset, so I get it.

PHIL: Yeah. For 2020 and part of 2021, that is where the show was recorded. Just a quick explanation of the case study in and of itself: we would take a horror movie based on a true story or allegedly true events and we would run down an analysis of the movie versus the true events themselves and discuss the discrepancies. Sometimes we would connect dots that maybe weren’t there but we thought should be there. For this month, we decided to do the movie Child’s Play, the original Chucky movie.

JIM HAROLD: Oh yeah, we just watched it over Halloween.

PHIL: Yeah, it’s a beauty to this day, that first movie. Jim, I’m going to assume you are familiar with the story out of South Florida involving Robert the doll.

JIM HAROLD: Oh yeah.

PHIL: There’s a lot of controversy and discrepancies as to whether or not Child’s Play and the script was actually based on the story of Robert the doll. The screenwriter of Child’s Play says no; many people say yes. So we recorded an episode about it, and it was very fun and very entertaining. However, during the recording – and if you go back into the Unexplained Inc. archives, this is still on the show during recording, unedited, as we speak, to this very day – something very strange happened.

At the tail end of the episode, when my friend Amy and I were talking about Robert the doll – and Jim, you and I talked about this both on and off the air, about incorporating humor into the show – I think this is one example of where maybe the humor went a little bit too far. I made a comment about there’s a difference between humor and taking the piss out of something. We maybe took a little too much piss out of the Robert the doll story. I’ll argue that. [laughs] Because at some point at the tail end of the show – I don’t have the exact timestamp for you right now, but it is near the end of the episode, in the last 10 to 15 minutes, we’re carrying on about Robert the doll and his story, and “Okay, is this doll really a menace? Is it really cursed, or are people just running wild with overactive imaginations?”

When Amy and I were carrying on about this over Zoom, all of a sudden something really strange happens. Just to set the table – no pun intended – I have my gear and my laptop up at the kitchen table, and at the other end was this paint set that my daughter got for her birthday earlier that year because we were in lockdown much of 2020, and she’s quite an artiste, and my mother and I collaborated and said, “Hey, let’s get her this paint set to keep her occupied because she’s going to be indoors a lot.”

So at the other end of the table there’s a canvas, brushes, the paint itself, and there’s this margarine dish. It’s an empty margarine dish we were using for water for when she was doing the painting. And at some point when I’m carrying on with Amy about Robert the doll, in my peripheries, in my right eye, which I’m pointing to right now, this thing literally flies off the table. Completely unprovoked.

On the recording – I didn’t edit this at all; I decided to leave it in as-is – you can hear this little whoosh and it bouncing off of my ceramic tile kitchen floor, and there’s a pause, and I think Amy may have said “What was that?” and I said, “Well Amy, I think we need to stop talking lightly about Robert the doll because this margarine dish that is used for painting just flew off my kitchen table, and I’m the only one in the kitchen right now.”

JIM HAROLD: You’ll notice I’m not making any jokes right now.

PHIL: No, I see you’re very serious. You’re looking very serious.

JIM HAROLD: Very serious. I don’t want to offend. [laughs]

PHIL: For sure.

JIM HAROLD: Wow, wow, wow. That’s wild. Go ahead.

PHIL: Sorry, I was just going to say, Jim, also, I’d like to have time for Story #2.

JIM HAROLD: Oh yeah, I was just going to segue into it. I understand you had a UFO story.

PHIL: Yeah, that Robert the doll story is fun, but I don’t think it’s a standalone. It needs a bookend to go next to it. A little bit of a background: one night, I’m going to say around 2011, I was driving home from work really late. I used to work late at night. This is around two o’clock in the morning. Just off the highway, in an area where there’s not a lot of air traffic, I see this light. It flies across and it does a reverse checkmark and flies off and I don’t see it. I’m like, “That’s not a plane. I’m not sure what that was, but that definitely was not an aircraft I’m familiar with.” Could’ve been a satellite, but in that very tired, hazy post-work drive, I came to the conclusion that had to have been some type of a UFO. I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t like any aircraft I’ve ever seen. I didn’t think much of it.

Fast forward almost a decade. I won’t get too much into this because it gets convoluted and hard to explain, but I had a guest on the podcast from Australia late last year named Carrie-Anne Fields. It is one of the longest chats I have ever recorded. Carrie-Anne is very psychic and allegedly has contact with extraterrestrial beings or interdimensional beings in her practices, which I found very interesting. I also joined a Facebook group that she helps run, and there are some exercises and some meditations that can help you connect to multidimensional versions of yourself. I for one don’t believe that this 3D, flesh-and-bone version is the only version of us that exists, nor do I think the 3D is the only dimension that exists.

So I go through these exercises and I make some incredible breakthroughs and I journal them. This is on a Sunday night in mid-December. Tuesday, I’m driving home from the gym at around 10 p.m., which was my usual time of getting home from there. I want to point out I live about 10 to 15 minutes away from a small regional airport. Growing up, I lived probably less than an hour from Toronto’s Pearson Airport in a bedroom community.

JIM HAROLD: So you’re familiar with what planes look like in the sky.

PHIL: Yeah, both in day and at night, because I’ve been living under that flight path most of my life. This place, which I’ve been in for almost a decade, I’m near a regional airport. I’m used to seeing planes at certain hours, day and night. I know what they look like, you know what I mean?

JIM HAROLD: Yep.

PHIL: Anyway, I’m driving home, I’m about to hang a left onto my street where my building is, and there’s this church on the corner. I just happen to look up, and this is a cloudy, rainy December evening, a bit seasonably warmer than usual for that time of year. But the point is, there’s no stars. It’s a cloudy, overcast night. I look up, I see this white light, and it looks like a shooting star, but then all of a sudden – you’ll see here with my finger – and this happened so fast that it’s almost as if I didn’t even see it at all, but it goes back like a slingshot, then it’s gone. It’s into the clouds.

JIM HAROLD: For audio listeners, it was like you pulled back and went forward really fast, just like a slingshot.

PHIL: Yeah, or even a catapult.

JIM HAROLD: Wow.

PHIL: I pull into my parking lot and then I’m like, wait, what the hell was that? [laughs] I’ve never seen that before in the near decade I’ve been living here. So I got out of my car, I’m going to my front door, really contemplating, and I look up – off in the horizon in this cloudy night, I see an actual airplane flying around. It did not resemble whatsoever this white light that slingshotted.

Now this is where the story gets pretty weird and interesting. I tell a couple of my friends. I text them, “I think I saw a UFO. I’m not playing. Something really weird happened.” I think it was on my Twitter feed, I see a group of these white lights I believe over Wisconsin from early December of 2022, and they’re all in this formation. It’s almost an exact image of what I saw in my own neighborhood, so I post it to my Instagram, I get people to say their thoughts on it. A friend of mine also sent me these other videos from Dubai, which has very similar types of lights and sightings. So I definitely think I’m onto something.

Long story short, I’m on a family vacation in Arizona and I end up in Tucson with some friends of the podcast. I’d never visited Tucson before. One of them is a medium. I’m fortunate enough to get a channeling session with him in the store, just he and I one on one, mano a mano. A lot of that is personal stuff, which will remain private, but I was asking him about what I saw, and he proceeds to tell me, and then says, “Yeah, it was probably the Zeta Greys you saw. It was one of their crafts.” Now, I haven’t been able to practice this much because we’ve been in the dead of winter and had really crazy weather here in Southern Ontario, but he recommended to me to go outside, meditate, and telepathically ask for the ship to come back, and he believes it will.

If that works, he also believes that I can go beyond that and start communicating with some of these Greys telepathically. I have not put this into theory yet, but when the weather warms up, I think I should give it a try.

JIM HAROLD: Well, please keep us updated on your progress. I’m serious, I’d like to know, because it’s interesting to me not only these things where people see something and they just see something and it’s detached from them, but they think there might be some kind of spiritual interaction or some awareness or communication. That’s always fascinated me.

Another thing that fascinates me is great podcasts, and you’re the host of Unexplained Inc., where the unknown connects with the empowered. Give us a minute or two, what people can expect if they tune in and where they can tune in.

PHIL: I’m going to start here by saying very recently, I’ve just launched the brand-new website unexplainedinc.com. You’re going to, on the site, see what the show is all about and where I come from with it. You’re going to get the paranormal, you’re going to get the extraterrestrial, you’re going to get the cryptid, the metaphysical, the psychic, and even into some of the conspiracy realm as well.

This phrase, “where the unknown connects with the empowered,” is a new phrase I thought up when I relaunched the show last summer after going on a hiatus and deciding to switch from a week to week to a seasonal format. Another way of saying that phrase is where paranormal and spirituality collide, so to speak, so you get the best of both worlds. There’s a heavy metaphysical and spiritual component I like to bring in with the unknown because I think in the greater web of life, it’s all connected.

Where you can listen, it’s available on all major podcasting platforms. iTunes, Spotify, just to name a couple. And of course, I have my built-in feed player on unexplainedinc.com for you as well. And also, you can follow Unexplained Inc. on Facebook. I’m also on Twitter @phantomphil3. Not as active on that right now, but I’m working to boost that up. And Unexplained Inc. on Instagram, which is where most of the freshest updates and announcements are. And also, I don have this ready quite yet, Jim, but in the works is going to be my own Patreon page for Unexplained Inc. I have some bonus content recorded already, and I will be working on more. But you can check out the website and the socials for when that is all available.

JIM HAROLD: Phil, thank you so much. You were very generous to have me as a guest on your show for your milestone anniversary, so thank you for that. That was a lot of fun, and I hope everybody checks out Unexplained Inc. And thank you for sharing your campfire stories. Stay spooky!

PHIL: Thanks, Jim. You as well.

JIM HAROLD: Next up on the Campfire is a return caller. Therese is back from Nova Scotia, and we’re so glad to speak with her once again. She had talked to us about her mom, and she’s going to talk to us about signs from after her mom passed. We appreciate her coming back on the show to talk about such a personal and poignant subject. Thank you so much, Therese. I appreciate it, and please tell us what happened.

THERESE: Thank you, Jim. There’s been a few of them, but today I decided to talk about some of the ones that are easier to explain and stand out the most to me, and I think will probably stand out the most to you and your listeners. These also go in chronological order of when they happened.

The first big one I noticed was before my mom had passed, probably three years or so before she passed, she bought me a clock that I absolutely loved. It was farmhouse style, just right up my alley. I really loved it. I always had it on the wall, even though I didn’t always look at it for the time. But a bit after my mom passed, I noticed that the battery had died in the clock. I didn’t really think anything of it other than “Yeah, it’s been about three years, the battery could be dead.” So I changed the batteries, and then about a week later I noticed that it had stopped again. I was like, “That’s weird,” but thought maybe I put in old batteries or something. You know sometimes if batteries get really cold, it drains them. So I thought maybe the drawer I had them in, they were dead, they were bad, they were just lemons. So I changed them again. About a week later, again I noticed the clock had stopped working. I was like, “Whatever, I really like the clock. I’m just going to keep it up there out of principle,” because it was a gift from her and it meant a lot to me.

Then fast forward to October 2022. This was after she passed, about a year and a bit. At this particular time, it was a weekend, and I had both of my nephews come stay with me for the first time since she had passed. I’d had them on other weekends, but just one at a time. There’s two of them, so I was like, “You can have Mommy time and I’ll take one of them off your hands, sister.” So I would do that, but this time I had both at the same time. I had just put them to bed, so it was pretty quiet in the house. I turn the TV down and just sit down to watch some TV.

Then all of a sudden, because it was quiet, I heard a tick… tick… tick. Looked up, and – this isn’t a clock that you can see the seconds. It doesn’t have any extra hands. It just tells you the hour and the minute. It doesn’t have the second hand going around. So I got up and I investigated, and lo and behold, the clock was working. I hadn’t done anything to the batteries, nothing. I don’t know how to explain these other than you just get a feeling, and I was like, “Okay Mom, you’re here.” Got a little teary eyed, and I was like, “Okay, I’m hearing you, Mom. Thanks.”

The second big thing that happened that really was compelling, goosebumps, some tears, was about a month later in November 2022. I received this message from a friend over Facebook. I’m going to read this verbatim. My friend said, “Okay, so I totally forgot to message you this morning. I had a dream about your mom. It was kind of weird, but a good weird though. Something had happened and for some reason I was visiting her, and you said, ‘It’s no problem. Mom will help anyone in need.’ And I remember looking out the kitchen window of this house” – and she puts in brackets “[unknown house, have never seen it before in real life]. Someone had said in my dream that she had moved there recently. I asked, ‘How you like it up here?’ She smiled as a horse ran to the kitchen window. She came over to the window for a better look, and while smiling, she said, ‘I absolutely love it. It’s like living in a dream.’ And then I woke up.”

I get teary eyed here because first of all, my friend had never seen my house before. We were childhood friends, you drift apart, and you move apart. Life gets busy. But she definitely did know my mom. And then the other significant piece of this that’s probably more important is that I actually have a horse, and he was pastured outside of my kitchen window. I could literally see him from the window when doing dishes, because his water trough is right there. So you’d see him walking by every so often. When I told my friend this, she’s like, “Send me some pictures!” So I did, I sent her pictures of the kitchen, and she’s like, “Wow, that’s the exact same kitchen except there was a door where the pantry is,” and she actually outlined it on the picture and sent it back to me.

This gets weirder. I have another friend who’s a psychic, and I was telling her about this dream and that I planned to share it on this show, because I told her about the first time I had recorded and how excited I was. She actually helped me with the other story. I had typed it up; it was cathartic. Anyway, I was like, “I wonder what color the horse was.” Because she had never told me. My friend didn’t even say it in the story. So my other friend was like, “Oh, the horse was all brown.” I was like, “Okay, look at my horse.” I showed her a picture of my horse, and she said, “It was that color brown except there was no white spot on the horse’s face,” meaning that it wasn’t my horse.

At this point I’m like, I’m going to message my friend to see if she remembers the color of the horse. I was like, “Do you by any chance remember the color of the horse?” The friend who had had the dream. This is me messaging her. She’s like, “It was a light brown.” I was like, “Okay, was it this horse by any chance?” She said, “It was that color, except there was no white spot.” This is a quote. She said: “Brown but without the white spot.” These two friends don’t know one another. At all.

JIM HAROLD: Right, the fact those two things coordinated so closely.

THERESE: Right. They would not have been able to say to each other, “There was no white spot.” And one was in person, the other was online, so there was no way she was involved in that conversation either. I thought that was really interesting.

I thought more about it and I was like, I don’t know what horse it could be because my old horse also had white on her face. So I’m like, it wasn’t Cyber. Then all of a sudden it clicked in; I was like, my mom used to have horses before she had us kids. I don’t have anybody to ask what color her horses were, but I’m thinking maybe it was one of her horses. I do remember one was named Ginger, so it was probably a red mare. That could be who it was. Maybe Ginger is here. Maybe Mom’s here.

JIM HAROLD: That’s neat. And the fact of that dream and everything lining up. I assume all of this is of great comfort to you when it comes to your mom.

THERESE: Yeah, it certainly does.

JIM HAROLD: I know that we’ve had many people on the show who have had communication from the other side in one way or the other. Sometimes it’s very indirect, sometimes it’s through a dream, but it’s always in a way that it would mean something to someone. And obviously that’s the way your mom has gotten in touch with you. Therese, all the best. Thank you so much for sharing these very poignant stories about your mom and how she’s reached out to you.

THERESE: Thank you.

JIM HAROLD: Thanks so much for joining me today on the Campfire.

And if you like what we do, please make sure that you follow and subscribe in the podcast app of your choice if that’s how you listen because that really does help us. It helps move us up on the charts; that way other people see us, they start listening to the show, and guess what happens? You get more great stories like the ones you heard today. So we’d appreciate it. It’s a virtuous circle, and really we don’t have those big marketing budgets. We advertise here and there, but we can’t compete against some huge conglomerate that has 600 radio stations, so we need you. We need your help. We need you to spread the word to your friends online and off, and also to make sure that you follow or subscribe in the app of your choice. We thank you so much.

We will talk to you next time. Have a great week, everybody! Stay safe and stay spooky. Bye-bye.

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


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