A new house is very haunted, confrontation with a possible Bigfoot, a household appliance that had a mind of hits own, an emotional vision and more on this edition of Campfire recorded live at Monster Fest 2 on June 29,. 2024.

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TRANSCRIPT

Jim Harold (00:00:00):

My new house is haunted. That’s the lead story of this week’s show. Live from Monster Fest. Up next on the campfire.

Announcer (00:00:25):

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 (00:00:36):

Welcome to the Campfire. I am Jim Harold, and so glad to be here with you once again. And we have a special show today. Now we’ve got the usual, we’ve got some hauntings, we have some cryptids, the usual kind of campfire stories you’d hear. The only difference is we recorded them this past weekend live at Monster Fest two, that is that great festival held on a yearly basis the last couple of years from small town monsters, those great movie makers who do documentaries on Cryptids, and it’s led by the great Seth Breed. Love. You’ll hear from him on this episode. And it was just a joy. Again, kudos to everybody at Small Town Monsters. Got to hang with the astonishing Legends guys and a lot of other great folks. Really enjoyed it, and I hope they do it again next year. So in addition to that, we’ve been working on a lot of behind the scenes stuff here at the Spooky Studio that we think will improve your listening experience, both as a listener to our free shows and specifically for our plus members. And we’ll be giving you more information on that in the weeks to come. So let’s get to it live from Monster Fest. It was a lot of fun and we got some great stories like this one. Well, I have with me now. Many of you have heard her. You may not have seen her Dar Harrell,

(00:02:09):

And I thought as we got going with this campfire, we tell campfire stories. And actually now today’s campfire is not going to be just crypted, it’s going to be whatever. The folks here. We have about a dozen stories. Thank you so much. Are going to be a range. UFOs, cryptids, ghost, whatever we have in this container here. But D has a really kind of poignant story that happened to her before it was ever podcasting or anything. So Dar, can you tell us what happened? 2001.

Dar (OH) (00:02:39):

2001? Yeah. Many of you may have heard this story. It’s been on the podcast a number of times. So 2001, my mom became very ill. She was sick. She was dying. I was spending a lot of time with her. I wanted to be with her every minute I could. But the one night she was like, you need to go home. You need to go home to your family. And I said, no, no, no, I’m staying here. So I did. And she’s like, no, no, no, go home. But I kind of stayed and stayed in the living room where she didn’t know I was there. And then I went to check on her and she saw I was still there, and she’s like, go home. So I went home and Jim, I think you were taking care of Cassandra at the time and just kind of getting household stuff together and how you do when things are tough in your life. So I’m like, we got to go to bed. So we went to bed and all of a sudden, two in the morning I woke up and I looked over Jim’s shoulder. We were both sleeping. I look over shoulder and I saw what I immediately knew as Mother Mary, Virgin Mary, unlike any depiction I’ve ever seen then and since. I’ve never seen anything look like that ever white. And she just stood there and she was right over your shoulder. And I’m like, oh my God. I’m like, I’m not dreaming. I’m awake.

Jim Harold (00:04:05):

And this is before any Paranormal Podcast. Oh, yeah, before podcasting existed.

Dar (OH) (00:04:10):

So I, I’m like staring at her and she’s just, she’s smiling and it was so peaceful and I just felt so peaceful at that moment. I’m like, wow. And then she was gone immediately. It was really, really fast. And I said, it’s kind of weird, and I didn’t want to wake you up. We’d all been exhausted. And I said, well, I’ll just tell him in the morning. And hopefully he believes me. Like, oh my God, I saw this. And literally a few minutes later, maybe half hour, I get a phone call and my mom had passed. And the significance of that kind of rang true with me because she was so devoted to Mary. She prayed the rosary every day. She was very, very religious, but it was always about Mary. Even when she got married, she was like, I have to give roses to the statue Mary. It was just always about Mary. So when I saw her, I felt like that was it. My mom was giving me a sign she passed, and it was before I even knew she passed over. So yeah, it was very, I’m sorry, it’s a little emotional even now, all these years later. And just the vision of it, and I still have it in my head, and I could see it as plain as day I could see her. So I always thought that was my little paranormal story. My mom kind of gave me a sign. Well,

Jim Harold (00:05:29):

I totally believe it. As I always say on the shows, I believe they come back in ways that will be very significant to the target, so to speak, the person who’s experiencing it. In that case, you knew what that meant? Oh,

Dar (OH) (00:05:42):

Immediately. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, not when it happened. When it happened, I’m like, oh my God, I’m seeing Mary. That’s kind of weird because I was raised Catholic, but I wasn’t very strict, kind of called myself A CEO Christmas Easter only. So I wasn’t as devout as my mom at all. I didn’t pray to marry like that. It was just not a thing. So I was like, wow, why is she coming to me? And then when I got the phone call from my dad, I knew immediately. I knew immediately.

Jim Harold (00:06:14):

And so many people have called into the shows with these kind of stories, and it’s just amazing. Especially even as much as I do this, it brings it to home when you have it in the family. So thank you for sharing that.

Dar (OH) (00:06:26):

Thank you.

Jim Harold (00:06:32):

Next up, we have some brand new stories. Nicole, who’s a big supporter of the podcast and we appreciate, brought me some ESP cards from the Rhine Institute. So thank you, Nicole. Very cool. We might do a live stream of those or something, but Nicole has a brand new story. You said only maybe close family has heard this story. Tell us what happened.

Nicole (00:06:53):

So I just recently moved into a new house. I sold my tiny little house that was kind of rural to move farther away from people and bigger house out in the country. It was an old farm that got sold and is being developed. It’s one really long, about a half a mile long, so it’s not going to be a huge development. So I was really excited, brand new build, first person to live in the house. Ironically, I do paranormal research. I was doing talks last year at the libraries, and my talk was titled 13 Reasons Your House Might Be Haunted. And of course only one of them is that somebody might’ve died in it. I don’t know if I brought this on myself,

(00:07:41):

But very quickly, once I moved into the house, there was a lot of creepiness to it, and I figured, well, it’s because new neighborhood, I’m like the eighth person to move out here. I don’t have blinds on my windows yet because they haven’t come from the big company that you can order them from. And so when you’re used to being able to shut the blinds or curtains at night, you get a little bit of a comfort factor there. I wasn’t getting that. So at first I was very much blaming all of that for what was going on. So I have a few bullet points here. I’m not going to read it directly, but I wanted to make sure because second time I’ve told this story that I hit all the points. So it’s me and my black cat Penny. And when we first moved in, she was freaked out.

(00:08:32):

Well, she’s a cat. She’s going to be freaked out in a new place. So I kind of ignored all of her red flags thinking we just moved in two days in right before the move. By the way, my desktop died, so I was relying on an old laptop. I turned the laptop on. I’m trying to pay some bills online, and suddenly I don’t have control of my laptop. Somebody else is running it. So I have enough IT knowledge, I’m thinking somebody’s taken over remotely and oh my gosh, how did I get malware on this laptop? I never use it. And it’s got the touchscreen capability. So after fighting with the mouse, I finally just turned it off through the touchscreen and closed it. And a few days later, I went back on, ran a scan. There’s no malware or virus on it. So I’m like, well, that was really weird, still technology, whatever.

(00:09:26):

It’s fixed. Let’s keep going. Started hearing noises that were not necessarily normal house noises, including one evening it sounded like something dropped something on my roof, like huge bam shook me. I walked into my bedroom, my cat who had been sleeping was standing up looking at the roof. So she heard it too. And again, just thought, well, maybe a bird flying over, dropped something, dropped a mouse, whatever. I’m out in the country. Who knows what’s going on. Okay. Then it got weird. About three weeks into living here, I’m in the kitchen and it’s a open floor plan. Kitchen runs into the living room. At the end of the living room, there’s a hallway that goes back to the bedrooms. I’m in the kitchen getting ready to make dinner, and I see my cat walking around the corner toward me, and I’m talking to her and she comes all the way up and sits down at my feet, and I turn around to do something in the sink and I turn back around, she’s not there.

(00:10:35):

I see her walking around the corner toward me, and she does the exact. And at this point, I’m like, oh my gosh, I’ve heard about this. I’ve never experienced this. It’s creepy when you hear somebody else tell the story, but what the heck just happened? Am I losing my mind? Even though I investigate the paranormal? This just seems too far out there. So about a week later, at this point, I’m very creeped out and I’m thinking, I should probably investigate my own house. But you’re really, I don’t know, pushing the envelope. When you do something like that, sometimes you’d rather not know. But then I started getting attacked in my sleep. So was I got up four o’clock in the morning to go to the bathroom, went back to the bathroom, or went back to bed, was lying on my left side, and the lamp was behind me, and I had fallen back to sleep, but suddenly I had a pressure on my forehead and there was a very bright light that was moving.

(00:11:44):

It looked like it was getting brighter and brighter, so I had my eyes closed. But when somebody turns on the light, you can sense it through your eyelids. So it’s not necessarily you have to open your eyes to see there’s a light on. It didn’t make sense that the light was coming from in front of me because I had turned off the lamp and it was behind me. So if I had accidentally left the lamp on, it should have been a light behind me and not in front of me. It kept getting more intense. Then I had a pressure on my head that turned into, it’s hard to explain. My scalp got very tight, and then it felt like it rippled from that point of pressure through my head turned into a shutter when it hit my neck. And having grown up Catholic, I immediately started saying the Lord’s Prayer.

(00:12:33):

I still had not opened my eyes. It was just our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. And as soon as I got to that spot, it all stopped and everything got calm. I opened my eyes, I looked around. Of course, there’s nothing there. So at that point I’m like, did I just have a stroke? And I looked it up and I asked some nurse friends that day and they were like, no, that’s not really symptoms of a stroke. So then I texted a friend of mine who’s a shaman, and I do energy work, but this is all out of my league. So I texted him and I said, can you tell from afar if somebody has picked up a spirit attachment? I had done some investigations at an asylum the month before, and I thought maybe I picked something up. And he said, sure, we can talk on Monday.

(00:13:24):

So I set an appointment with him on Monday weekend goes by Monday morning, about four o’clock in the morning. I’m having a dream that I’m at a concert at a local bar that I work at sometimes. And I was upset that nobody was there. And then people started showing up and I was really excited. And then everything went really dark, people disappeared, everything went gray. And it was like from a third person point of view, I could see a hand reaching out to touch my back. And I started to wake up and I was like, yell, whispering, go away. And as I did that and woke up, I felt something hit my back and go through me. And the covers moved as if it was responding to somebody like moving the covers. And it wasn’t me. And at that point, it was the same day that I was having my appointment with my friend.

(00:14:21):

So we did that. He said, there are two entities present. One is of the light and it’s protecting you, which one of my prayers for protection is please protect me in white light and positive energy. So that kind of made sense with the light. The other is dark, it’s attached to the land, and it’s very angry about what’s going on there. It’s really mad that the land is being developed. And of course, since I’m the sensitive, I don’t know if I’m the only sensitive in the neighborhood. I haven’t met all my neighbors yet, but we tend to attract the attention from the other things. They can tell that we are. And I was ignoring it, and I was blowing it off, and it made it mad. So that afternoon after work, I saged the house, but holy water at the entrance and the exit, and I haven’t had anything happen since.

Jim Harold (00:15:19):

And you spoke to something really interesting. There was the fact that it’s kind of like it’s one thing when you go somewhere else and investigate it, but it’s a whole different feeling when it’s in your own new house. Oh, okay. Okay. A note from not live, Jim in the studio, we had a sudden electrical outage as Nicole was telling this freaky story. So coincidence, you be the judge. Back to the story. How did that sage work out for you, Nicole? Do we have any Now? How did that sage work out? Oh,

(00:16:02):

You didn’t expect this, did you? I knew I got a button down here.

Nicole (00:16:08):

I

Jim Harold (00:16:08):

Think my heart just makes it a little extra spooky.

Nicole (00:16:12):

Well,

Jim Harold (00:16:13):

No, that’s a great story. I do want to get to more stories, but just to finish that thought, that had to be a wild feeling.

Nicole (00:16:20):

It was very bizarre. Again, I go in and I help other people with what’s going on in their homes. And to have it happen in mine for the first time since I was a teenager just was like, I am not immune.

Jim Harold (00:16:33):

Yeah, there you go. I don’t think any of us are very good. Thank you. Nicole

(00:16:39):

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(00:18:26):

Social media fans, follow me on X or on Threads. You can find me on both platforms @theJimHarold. That’s at the Jim Herald, and I’ll see you there. Stay spooky. And back to the campfire.

(00:18:43):

The next story is really appropriate Summer from Cleveland, and she gave this to us before she came in, and I thought it was a really appropriate story. Right now, summer, tell us what happened.

Summer (OH) (00:18:57):

This takes place in my mom’s house in Florida. Now, every house my mother has ever lived in has had activity. And at this point, I don’t think it’s the house. I think it’s my mother. So whenever I go to visit her, I don’t sleep well because I’m always expecting something to happen, to see something, to experience something. And this time was no different. My husband and I had gone to visit for a week and early in the week, we had all gathered in the family room to watch a movie, watch the movie. It was afterwards. My parents decided to go to bed. After a while, my brother decided to go home, and then probably about 11 or 1130, my husband and I decided we were going to go to bed, and we turned off the tv. We turned off the DVD player. We had a lengthy discussion about how to turn off the soundbar, couldn’t figure it out, and decided to leave it, turn off the lights, went to bed. So about two o’clock in the morning, I got up, went to the bathroom, everything was quiet. About four 30 in the morning, he and I were both awakened to thumping techno music.

(00:20:09):

We both woke up and I said, we were complaining about the neighbors sitting in their car at four 30 in the morning, thumping the music and how rude can that be? And he got up and went to the bathroom. And when he opened the door, music was louder and music was coming from inside the house. So this is crazy. What is this? And we go out to the family room and the DVD player had kicked on, and it was the music from the menu from the movie that we had watched that night was playing on repeat. And we turned off the DDD player. I know I did. I said, the TV wasn’t on, said, this is so weird. And we chalk it up to electronic glitch, turned it off, went back to bed, told my parents about it the next day. And they’re like, yeah, we’ve never had that happen before.

(00:21:01):

It’s never done that. That’s weird. Yeah, she, maybe it’s going bad or something. So all week long, again, just Ill at ease because I always am in the house. And finally the last night that we’re there, we’re going to bed, and I just said to whoever was there, I said, we have a long drive tomorrow, we have to drive back to Ohio. I’m tired. I haven’t slept all week. Please just leave us alone tonight. Let us get our sleep. Thank you. And we went to bed, 7:00 AM his alarm goes off. We both wake up Morning, honey morning. How’d you sleep? Oh, I slept great. How’d you sleep? I said, wonderful. This is best night of best night’s sleep I’ve had all week. And we’re laying there and all of a sudden we hear thumping techno music.

(00:21:51):

And I said, are you kidding me? I grabbed my phone and I look and it’s 7 0 4. And we got up and we go out and sure enough, the DVD player had kicked on again. Yeah, we left the DVD and the DVD player. Why we did that? I don’t know, but he turns it off. I said, wait, I have an idea. And I set the timer on my phone. I said, hit the power button on the DVD player. And he did. And we waited through the previews and through everything else. And then at the moment, the techno music started was four minutes after he had hit the power button. And I said, this DVD player came on at 7:00 AM When’s your alarm clock went off? I said, because it’s 7 0 4. That’s when we started hearing music. I said, they listened to me, said they left me alone all night long, and it’s seven o’clock.

Jim Harold (00:22:42):

They turned on that DVD fire.

Summer (OH) (00:22:46):

So she said, it’s never happened since. It’s never happened again. Wow. Just an interesting,

Jim Harold (00:22:53):

Yeah, electrical stuff can be interesting. Cannon, we had a story very early in the beginning of the campfire where a woman worked at a funeral home and lots of weird stuff happened, but one of the weirdest things was that pole lights would come on, but they weren’t plugged in, which that’s kind of an odd thing. Well, summer, thank you so much for that. Why do you think that you were the beneficiary of this techno music?

Summer (OH) (00:23:22):

My parents were downsizing. They were getting ready to move into a little tiny house. So this house was up for sale, and they were living in just either the kitchen or their bedroom. They were eating dinner, watching tv, everything in their bedroom, and the rest of the house was going unused. So my thought was, it was kind of a, Hey, come back to the family room. Come hang out. We haven’t had anybody in the house for so long. Come hang out. And

Jim Harold (00:23:50):

That’s feeling, oh, wow, a lonely house. Yeah, something like that. That’s very cool. Summer. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Trish told me a very interesting story about camping. Now you’re in beautiful Colorado, a gorgeous state, and you experienced some things that I think people at Monster Fest would be very interested in. So tell us what happened.

Trish (CO) (00:24:15):

Thanks, Jim. Yeah, 2017, I think it was, we went back country camping in Rocky Mountain National Park and the campground, it wasn’t campground. The camp site that we had reserved wasn’t very far in. It was only about a mile and a half. And we walk in there and you have to go down under the stream and then you go back up. But it’s surrounded by Woods Wood. So the site itself was kind of like this rock outcropping. So we set up and everything was fine. We were there for two nights, I believe, and we woke up one morning. It was early, and I don’t know what we were doing. What were we doing? We were just getting ready, I think. Yeah, we were just waking up, and we heard this down from on the stream, it sounded like that sounded like rocks when they’re moved underwater.

(00:25:08):

And we like, oh, crap, there’s a bear. There’s something there. And it sounded just, it stopped. And then they’re like, okay, it must have moved on. And then all of a sudden a rock came flying at us from, we couldn’t see anything. We couldn’t see where it was coming from, but it just came flying, and it hit the embankment really close to us. And then another rock came and we’re like, hello. We thought maybe it was some jerk camper or hiker or something who just had a bee in their bonnet. And it was really scary. It didn’t stop, and we didn’t hear anything. Nobody responded.

(00:25:49):

Nobody answered us, and it was just really creepy Then. So we went about our business and we had a good day. We came back, we woke up the next morning, same time rocks started being thrown at our campsite, and it was just, I was shaking. We hadn’t even gotten out of bed at that time, and I was just shaking. I was like, this isn’t normal. But I couldn’t imagine that somebody would come back and decide to throw rocks at us. And honestly, we weren’t thinking Bigfoot, we weren’t thinking anything. It was just like, that is so weird and disconcerting. And then it was only a couple years later that we were like, huh? We started hearing about one of the behaviors of Bigfoot is the rock throwing thing. And we’re like, I wonder if that was a Bigfoot that didn’t want us camping there, but

Jim Harold (00:26:44):

Yeah, maybe they felt you were intruding on their territory. That’s interesting. And kind of harrowing. And I mean, I wouldn’t think that would be bare or anything. I mean, I don’t even know if they can do that with their Yeah,

Trish (CO) (00:26:54):

Well, our site was up a hill, so there’s no way. Yeah, a bear could throw it up there, but I’m actually glad that nothing else happened. I’m glad

Jim Harold (00:27:03):

That, no, that’s good.

Trish (CO) (00:27:04):

We didn’t receive a visit to our campsite, but that’s it. That’s what,

Jim Harold (00:27:08):

There you go. Well, thank you for that story. Welcome

Trish (CO) (00:27:10):

From Colorado.

Jim Harold (00:27:10):

You welcome. Trish said Wes had a short story, a good one. So tell us, Wes, tell us what

Wes (CO) (00:27:22):

Happened. It’s a very short story, and I’m a horrible storyteller. So anyways, we were getting ready to go on a long trip. We had gone to bed and we had to get up early because we had an early flight and normal, I was probably up and down a couple times during the night, and then all of a sudden the sheets just got ripped off of us all the way down to our feet. This was before our alarm clock went off or anything. And that’s the end of the story. It never happened. Never. We had no other experiences in that house. It was just a one time, really strange thing. We could talk

Trish (CO) (00:28:06):

About the music shadows.

Wes (CO) (00:28:09):

Okay. No,

Trish (CO) (00:28:11):

30

Jim Harold (00:28:11):

Seconds. Yeah, go ahead. Okay, cool.

Trish (CO) (00:28:13):

Yeah, so we were really into music. We went to this house concert in Colorado, and it was a three level house. And so the music was in the basement, and we came up to the mid-level. It was a lot and a lot of people, a lot of noise or whatever. And we were both facing towards the door, and this is back when I had more vision. And then all of a sudden out of nowhere, we see this shadows spur around a corner and zip downstairs. And I was like, I think maybe my eyes are falling apart at the times. So I’m like, was there something there? Am I just having a retina problem? And he’s like, no. So yeah, we saw they were going downstairs to hear the music. So I dunno if you have anything to add, but

Wes (CO) (00:28:52):

No, it just kind of followed the stairway down.

Jim Harold (00:28:57):

Well, thank you guys for your stories from Colorado. Thank you very much. Now, I don’t know if you all listen to Campfire, but if you’ve heard me say sometimes the show produces itself. Now, when you came in here, we asked for stories. We hadn’t talked with anyone coordinated, anyone and Wes’ story involved, bedsheets, and so does I just got a little chill. Okay, Eric, you’re up. Thank

Erik (IL) (00:29:31):

You, Jim. My name is Eric. I grew up in a small town in Illinois, and I just want to preface this story with just kind of the background of my home and what I was growing up around a kind of alcoholic father, very abusive, just a lot of disharmony in the home. And I was about four years old and I was already experiencing, I was having events where I was hearing things at night. We’re talking the 1970s, 77 ac. We didn’t really have house ac. It wasn’t like we still had the big radiator in the middle of the house for winter time. So windows were open, hot summer night. I could see the moonlight and the wind blowing in, but I would hear running across the wood floors when I was asleep. And my brother and I, we both shared a bedroom. I was in a twin bed.

(00:30:42):

He was in a twin bed, probably an arm’s length away from me, and catty, corny for me. I could see into the kitchen, and that comes into play later. So I’m sitting there and trying to sleep. I’m being awakened again by the little running. But the running this night turned into a little bit of laughter. I could hear people like something laughing, and then the edge of the end of my bed would get lifted and then dropped ever so slightly higher and then higher, and then it stopped. Then the sheets would start to get pulled off me the entire time. By the time the sheets are getting pulled off, of course, I’m like this holding onto my sheets. I’m looking over at my brother and I sit up in bed and I’m like, Marco help me. And I’m screaming at him. And then all of a sudden I look over into the kitchen and I see my mom and dad, and I’m like, I’m saved. There’s my mom and dad. They heard me. And I’m screaming still at my brother. I’m seeing these sheets getting pulled away from me. I’m still hanging off for dear life. I’m looking out the kitchen and I hear my mom. She’s hitting my dad and she’s speaking in Spanish. Yeah, go downstairs. Go downstairs. I hear it. I hear it. Go, go, go. And I see my dad going, okay, okay, okay. He’s going downstairs. They’re not coming for me. They’re going downstairs for whatever reason. I’m screaming. I pass out from fright

(00:32:49):

And I’m out, and I wake up in the morning. I have to get ready for school, and I am mad. I’m angry because the people that were supposed to sit here and protect me, they didn’t come rescue me. I’m sitting there freezing no blanket. It is summer, but I’m still cold because I have been without a blanket all night. And I go and my mom’s making breakfast. She’s like, I’m going to make you some breakfast. And I am mad. I’m angry. I’m looking at her, I’m like, why didn’t you come help me? Why? And she’s like, what are you talking about? She’s like, nothing happened. What are you talking about? And I told her, I was like, I saw you. I saw dad. I saw you yelling at him to go downstairs and her face just all the blood left her face. And she’s like, no. She’s like, mijo. She’s like, I told your dad. Go downstairs. I heard a baby crying. She’s like, and I kept hearing the baby. So she kept sending him downstairs to go downstairs to go see where that baby is. Years later. That was kind of the end of it, because I’m four. I’m not going to get angry with my mom forever. But I asked my dad about the story and he said, yeah. He’s like, that’s a true story. He’s like, that really happened. You’re a kid. You think maybe I just made some hump. He’s like, no, it happened. He’s like, I walked downstairs and he’s like, every step I took, the baby crying, kept getting louder and louder and louder. Like he said, the baby was screaming in his hair, just

Jim Harold (00:34:39):

Wow.

Erik (IL) (00:34:40):

And he took one more step and he said the house went completely silent. And I don’t know if I’m trying to correlate, is that when I passed out? Is that, when did the Poltergeist or whatever action happen, was that when it just

Jim Harold (00:34:58):

Stopped? Was it like a diversionary tactic where it was crying to divert your parents from attending to you?

Erik (IL) (00:35:05):

Correct.

Jim Harold (00:35:06):

Wow.

Erik (IL) (00:35:07):

Yeah. So that’s my story.

Jim Harold (00:35:09):

Thank you, Eric. That’s a spooky one. Thank you. And speaking of parents and spooky stories, Ryan certainly has one. This is pretty well, it fits this conference very well. Ryan, welcome. Tell us what happened.

Ryan (00:35:32):

Hi, thanks. So this was outside of Pittsburgh in one of the eastern suburbs in the late eighties. So it’s a firsthand account of a Bigfoot experience. But through my dad telling me that it happened, I had blacked it out and completely removed it from my memory. But about two years ago there in probably September, I just kept having these weird dreams about the house that we grew up in and regular house, nice neighborhood. It was kind of a part of a cul-de-sac. And the driveway ran down behind the house and behind the driveway there was a hill about 70 degrees, and it went into woods, and it was woods with a huge ravine. There was a waterfall, there were trees with vines. It was a significant amount of woods. But I kept having these dreams and I would wake up and I’d wake my wife up and what’s going on?

(00:36:26):

And I was like just having dreams about being a kid and this thing standing over me and screaming. And that’s sort of how this ends. So that’s like first night I have that dream. The second night I have this dream where I’m looking over the hill and there was this giant tree that had fallen over, and these things are popping up, looking over the edge of this tree, looking up the hill at me again. Then I kind of go to this place where this thing’s standing over me and I’m screaming. And then the third night, I don’t know if it sort of comically was me processing this, but then even though, I guess this was in the eighties, but in my dream, I have a cell phone and I got a picture of a baby Bigfoot, and the mom walks up to our garage door and knocks on it, points at me, give me the phone.

(00:37:11):

We got to get rid of this picture. I’m totally weird. So I am telling my wife about this, and she’s like, maybe we’re watching too much stuff. Let’s take a break. Let’s find something funny on Netflix or whatever. But I keep kind of having these, not as much, not as compressed as to dream night after night in a week, but I keep kind of having these. And a few weeks later we go and meet my parents at a pumpkin patch to take our younger daughter to go get a pumpkin. And we’re walking and she’s a little bit ahead of us. And so I look at my dad, I’m just like, did I ever say anything happened in the woods behind our house when I was little? And he immediately gets this big smile on his face and is like, oh, you mean the thing that lives down there? And I’m like, can we elaborate on this? What’s going on here? Excuse me. Yeah. And then he says that, and he looks over at my mom and she just kind of smiles a little bit, but it’s very much her sort of acknowledging that my dad was just big smiles, like, okay, can we talk about this? So I was like, Marcel, go. That’s my wife. Can you stick with Francis for a little bit? We have some major interrogations that need to happen happen.

(00:38:29):

So he remembers that. So I had an older brother who was named Eric as well. So interesting that you kept motioning to me as your brother. But he was a lot older, and he was very much a stereotypical older brother in the eighties that I was too much of a baby and a wimp to do anything by myself. I would never go down in the woods by myself, whatever. So I had made up my mind that I was going to go down in the woods. So I got my camouflage canteen. My dad very well remembers that canteen, and I have my red sweatshirt on. He remembers that. And I went down in the woods and he was raking leaves in our yard. And so about five, 10 minutes later, he hears me scream at the top of my lungs. So he comes running to the edge of our driveway where it goes down the hill, and he said, you got mud and leaves on your sweatshirt.

(00:39:17):

You’re trying to crawl up the hill and you’re bawling and you’re very uncoordinated, just basically just trying to do anything to get up this hill as fast as you can. And you got up the hill and you ran to me and you’re crying, and you grabbed me. And even though you weighed, I don’t know, 40 or 60 pounds at the time you were hugging me, but pushing me back towards the house saying, we need to get out of here. Something’s down there, there’s something alive down there. And they just thought I had scared myself for whatever else. And probably much like my brother, I was too scared to go down there, whatever else, but I had nightmares for a week. One of my parents had to stay with me until I fell asleep. And then as he’s telling me this, all of these other aspects of my life growing up through being a married adult are starting to click about this house.

(00:40:09):

So we were all really close in age. I have a brother and a sister, and so when we were all in high school, we had three refrigerators in our house, one in the kitchen, and two in the basement. Well, or in the garage. So to get to the garage, which had two doors, five windows, each facing the woods, you had to go downstairs and then open a door, which is about three feet from the garage doors, and then go in and the refrigerators were at the back of the garage towards the front of the house. And for whatever reason, I would always be reluctant when my mom would ask me to go down there, but I would. And even after we’re married, 20 some years later, I remember the last Thanksgiving we did at their house. She wanted me to get something out of these, and I did the same thing, and it had just become my thing. I went in, I pushed the door open, I reached around the wall to turn on the light. I very much sheared my eyes towards the ground, went right back to the refrigerators, got what I needed to get, kept my eyes towards the ground, looking away from there. Went in, got back in, pulled the door, turned the light off, pulled the door shut. My body was inside the basement at all times when I did that. No desire at all to have any sort of looking out those windows towards the woods. Anything else?

(00:41:29):

When we would always go to the library, there was one aisle that had the time. Life books, the big foot books,

Jim Harold (00:41:38):

How many written those time Life books?

Ryan (00:41:40):

And there had been a display on the end of one of them that had a big foot book. And I would run past that aisle because to get to the children’s section, you had to get there. Or I’d have my mom strategically positioned between me and the aisle because somehow the book was going to get me. I don’t

Jim Harold (00:41:58):

Know. I’ve heard similar things about people who think that they may have been victims of alien abduction, particularly the book Communion by Whitley Strieber. And people have seen that, and it’s really freaked them out. And I’ve heard that on multiple occasions with that book. Yeah, that associate, it’s like A-P-T-S-D almost.

Ryan (00:42:14):

Yes. So the other weird thing that fell into place was when we take the car, my dad was very adamant that when we come home driving the car, we had to park behind the house. I don’t know why. We lived in a very safe neighborhood, but he wanted us to park behind the house again, the driveway goes down behind the house. Typically, my brother and sister were older, so they were out of the house by the time I was driving. Friday night, I’d come home, I’d always park up near the top of the

Jim Harold (00:42:43):

Driveway because this thing’s bad down there, basic right?

Ryan (00:42:46):

So Saturday morning, I would get the every Saturday morning, if you want the car tonight, it will be behind the house when I wake up tomorrow morning, or you won’t have it the next week, well, of course I want the car, right? I would go and I would put on the high beams, go down behind the house, park the car, even though there was a back door to the house and the garage doors were there, I would park the car. I kind of make sure I was free of the seatbelt and stuff. I get out of the car, shut it, lock it. This was before remote locks and book it up the

Jim Harold (00:43:19):

Top of our

Ryan (00:43:20):

Driveway every single. And I’m like 16, 17, 18-year-old. Boy. Why am I worried about any of this? Again, 30-year-old man married with a family, not wanting to go into the garage, everything just so

Jim Harold (00:43:35):

Everything lined up that you had really experienced this as a child. I was

Ryan (00:43:38):

Like, didn’t. Why didn’t we ever talk about this? And he was like, but you never asked.

Jim Harold (00:43:45):

Well, it is a great story. Thank both of you, gentlemen for sharing your story. Excellent, thank you. I think Whitney actually called for permission to tell this story as she was sitting in the audience, so I appreciate that fast action. Whitney, tell us what happened.

Whitney (00:44:02):

So my friend’s kid is about two years old, and we think that she has a little bit of a gift. And there’s a few incidents that happened before I went to her house, and then one that happened at her house. So the first incident was she woke up, my friend in the middle of the night takes her to her bed and she says, mama, go sleep. So my friend pretends to be asleep, and she scoots away from her and starts just saying yes, no, yes, just answering questions to nobody there. And so of course, my friend is freaking out. We both watch a lot of horror movies. So she’s like, oh my gosh. So she always gets her husband. He goes and sits with her the next time it’s in the morning, and usually the daughter comes and wakes them up. First thing. She’s so excited to see them.

(00:44:45):

But this morning my friend sees her on the camera, there’s no audio, and she’s just staring at something for 15 full minutes at nothing. She can’t figure out what it is. So she goes in there and she’s like, what are you looking at? And she says, it’s min. She’s not waving anymore. So my friend has full body chills. She’s like, okay, let’s just go to the living room. So they go out to the living room and she says, and this is a direct quote, it’s mini, I see min in her eyes. And so my friend’s like freaking out still. The daughter asked to watch Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. So she puts on Mickey Mouse clubhouse, and she says, it’s min. She’s not scary. Implying of course, that the mini that she was seeing that morning was scary. So those were the two incidents that had already happened in addition to a lot of others.

(00:45:27):

Those were the ones that creamed me out the most. But the one that I witnessed was, she had actually seen this man a few different times around the house, and my friend had already told me about this before I arrived, but I was watching the horror movie, the Ring, and it’s the scene where Smar is coming out of the well, and her dogs are sitting next to me on the couch, and they start emitting this low growl, just like, and oh my gosh, I am mixed with this story. I’m sorry. Well, okay, this is fine. So the dogs are grumbling and they’re staring at this spot. And I’m remembering that earlier, her daughter had stopped midway running exactly where the dogs were growling later and said, the man is there. It’s scary. And ran back towards Usik. So we had wondered this whole time, is she just doing this for attention or her imagination or whatever? And then the dogs basically confirmed that. No, exactly where she cited the man was where the dogs were looking.

Jim Harold (00:46:19):

Now I’m curious. I know we’ve had this at the house with our dogs. How many here have had a dog, a cat, a pet? Look at something that wasn’t there? Raise hands. Yeah. Isn’t that the weirdest thing? It’s like, what are you seeing? Exactly.

(00:46:37):

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I believe that children have this ability. I feel like I’m repeating myself because many of you listen to the show, but they’re closer to the veil for whatever reason. They have the sense that we don’t have, and I think pets do too. Yeah, and your story kind of holds it up. Thank you for that story, Whitney. Thank you.

(00:46:59):

Jim Harold’s Campfire is brought to you by Grammarly. You know, you write across multiple platforms and places during your workday. I know that I do. I have my email, I use Canva, I use Google Docs, a lot of different apps. So delivering consistent, high quality communication everywhere, well, it’s absolutely key, and it’s sometimes tough to do, but you’ve got a friend in your corner, you’ve got Grammarly, because Grammarly is an AI writing partner that helps you get work done faster with high quality writing for better projects, proposals, presentations, and more.

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The thing I love about Grammarly is I can speak about it with absolute confidence because I have been a paying user for many years, way before they ever sponsored either of the podcasts, and it’s only gotten better. I’ve consistently used over the years as I do my email newsletters, I have utilized Grammarly to help me with that, to make sure that the spellings in line, that the grammar’s in line. Also, it is great for tone, to make sure that when I write my column, the tone is correct. So it really makes it more efficient, it makes it faster, but it’s still me because the key is, the way I think of to use AI is not to have it do the work for you, but to make it a partner, to make it kind of an editor. And I think it works very, very well, and so much so.

(00:48:30):

This new book that we came out with in May, True Ghost Stories: Jim Harold’s Campfire Six. I used it to check the grammar and so forth just to make sure that I was in line and I didn’t miss anything. And guess what? I did miss some things, but Grammarly caught them thankfully. So we absolutely use and love Grammarly here in the Spooky Studio. Writing is so important because better writing means a stronger impact. 96% of Grammarly users report that Grammarly helps them craft more impactful writing. Grammarly works across 500,000 apps on websites. You can get personalized writing suggestions based on your audience goals and context. And those tone suggestions I mentioned. They help you navigate even the most difficult work conversations. Now in these days, almost everybody has AI stamped on it, so you really have to know who to trust. Well, Grammarly is a name you can trust because data privacy and security are woven into the foundation of Grammarly.

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(00:50:10):

Tell a friend today about the campfire. In fact, share this episode with them on your favorite app, the one you’re listening to right now. Getting more listeners means getting more great campfire stories like this one. Samantha, she was at our UFO talk with Ryan Break. She’s back now to tell us a story. I think it’s about Gettysburg, right? Yes. Tell us what happened.

Samantha (00:50:32):

So anyone who’s ever been to Gettysburg, you know that there is a feeling everywhere you go, whether you believe in anything or not. There’s a feeling a lot happened there. I’ve been going with my family for 20 years now. Done the ghost walks, the bus tours, done pretty much everything you can. Staying at the Farnsworth House was something that we’d always wanted to do. So my husband and I stayed just the two of us. The first time, nothing happened to him. It was hot, it was cold. I didn’t sleep well. My dad wanted to go for his birthday. So we went back and that night was drastically different than the first night I had stayed in the Farnsworth house, starting with, we all just played games, hung out. I was much more at ease that time. But then that night, you hear the footsteps, you hear some of that stuff.

(00:51:16):

It’s an old creaky house, so you can kind of write those things off. Well, I finally fell asleep. I was happy. I was finally sleeping. And probably well after midnight, around two o’clock or so, I’m having this weird experience of, I’m assuming I’m asleep at this point, but then I start to feel something coming into the room. And this is after we had heard the footsteps outside, and it was something that I was kind of asleep, but I knew I was vulnerable. I was in bed and I was like, something is coming. I don’t like what is coming in this room. It’s making me really uncomfortable. I’m trying to wake myself up from this state. Wasn’t happening. My husband could sense something. He woke me up, but then I wasn’t speaking like myself. I was talking, not necessarily not tongues, but I wasn’t making any sense.

(00:52:04):

So he just was like, all right, I’m going back to sleep. I’m not dealing with this. I ended up falling back asleep myself. And then I weirdly went back into the exact same state with the exact same sense that something was coming in the room. I didn’t like it. I didn’t know what was happening. And at that point, if you’re not familiar with the Farnsworth House, it was taken over by snipers who were on, I believe, the Confederate side. So it was a very different vibe. It was in the union territory. So I was like something, I didn’t know what it was, but it was this feeling that I couldn’t shake. I’d been going to Gettysburg for 20 years, nothing had happened. You take pictures, you see orbs. But it was just one of those things where I woke up in the morning and I was like, so did anybody else hear anything? Anybody else feel anything? My husband didn’t hear anything. We heard the footsteps, but it was just this weird feeling of something is coming. I didn’t want to see it almost. And even in my sleep, I didn’t like what vibe it was bringing. And yeah, I haven’t had an experience like that since, but it was a little creepy.

Jim Harold (00:53:01):

Now, let me ask you this. You mentioned in the UFO session that you kind of consider yourself on the skeptical side. So how do you reconcile that, having these experiences? I know you said on the UFO side, there’s one that you and your husband were able to debunk. How does that work for you?

Samantha (00:53:20):

I think the fact that I was asleep the one time and that I was awake, I remember waking up and then I went back into the same exact state with the same exact feeling. I was like, something is here. As much as I like to be a skeptic, you can feel something. And like I said, Gettysburg has that feeling. And this was a feeling I was not familiar with in a place that I was very familiar with. So it was a lot of red flags and lot of strange things I hadn’t experienced going on ghost walks, being in the Farnsworth House on tours for years, and I had never felt this way before. So doing the compare contrast, it was very different from what I had previously experienced.

Jim Harold (00:53:55):

Well, thank you for sharing your story. We’ve had no more electrical disturbances. I’m glad to say, but there’s still time. Alright, we’re going to start with Keith. I love this one. I love this story.

Keith (00:54:16):

Oh, thank you. It’s pretty simple. So probably I was 19 maybe or 20, so it’s not like a childhood memory, but it is kind of a distant memory. I’m a little older now. And I also want to say, as a preface, probably for about 30 years, I thought about that and close to 30 years about that old. And I finally have settled on, yeah, this really did happen. So I mean, it’s one of those things. But anyway, so I’m in bed by myself, and you read a lot of science fiction growing up and a lot of kind of crossover sort of stuff that was sort of, they were horror stories, but they weren’t typical horror stories. They were things that were short stories, but they were kind of mind trick sort of stuff. You would read a detail and then you wouldn’t figure out till three pages later what that detail actually meant. So it would keep your mind, excuse me, going the whole time. And so I was reading a particular good one, and again in bed, and I’m sitting up and I got to the very end of it. And I don’t know if anybody else does this, if you’re by yourself, you think things, but you actually speak them. You ’em kind of mumble almost when you’re doing it. I

Jim Harold (00:55:43):

Mumble a

Keith (00:55:44):

Lot. Yes,

Jim Harold (00:55:45):

She can tell you.

Keith (00:55:47):

And so I put the book down against my chest and I said, wow, that was really spooky and a voice as clear as day. And I can hear it to this very day in my head, said right at the base of my bed, it said, thank you. And for years, years, I said, well, I fell asleep or I dreamed it, or I just imagined it. Or maybe it was a detail in the story, but no, it happened,

Jim Harold (00:56:21):

Keith. Yeah, thank you.

(00:56:32):

If you love our shows, you can support them by shopping at our Mausoleum of Merch. We’ve got fantastic shirts, t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, autographed books, all kinds of campfire gear, all kinds of Jim Harold gear, candles, the list goes on and on and on. Stickers, just a lot of different things. So if you love The Spooky and you love the Campfire, show your love by shopping at our Mausoleum of Merch, and you can get there by going to JimHarold.com/merch or click in the show notes, that’s Jim Harold dot com slash merch and would really appreciate it. And we just came from Monster Fest, as you know, and we had a great reaction to our shirts. I think the most popular shirt we have is called, I love to listen to ghost stories around Jim, Harold’s Campfire and has some skeletons dancing.

(00:57:31):

I think that’s our number one item in terms of that. People are also enjoying the autograph books. We’ve gotten a great response to that. So there’s a lot of things to look at, and I know I’ve been offering kind of very minor merch over the years, but Dar has taken this over and she’s done a fantastic job. We are proud to say we’re a star seller on Etsy, and people are really giving us great reviews. I really appreciate everybody who has purchased from Jim Harold’s mausoleum of merch, and I hope you get to check it out. It’s at Jim Harold dot com slash merch and I’ll give you some quick reviews. We had a review, such a cute cup. This was our camping campfire cup. I can’t wait to have my first cup of coffee in it on my next camping trip. I did get a bit excited when it arrived and christened it with a nice organic cabernet.

(00:58:27):

Love the campfire stories, love sign books. Thanks Jim. Harold. Fast. And exactly what I bargained for on book six. Lauren said, this is the best campfire book yet. Great gift for my sister. She loves it. So really, we appreciate everybody who has taken it as much as we want to say this spot to promote the Mausoleum of Merch.. We want to thank people who have actually shopped in it. So check it out, Jim Harold dot com slash merch. And we thank you for your support.

(00:58:57):

Jim here with a quick note before we get back to more Monster Fest stories. Now, the next few stories you’re going to hear actually from Monster Fest. One, our recording slot at the event this last weekend was 60 minutes long. Of course, this show is 90 minutes long and we wanted to make sure you got 90 minutes of content.

(00:59:17):

So with the help of my intrepid assistant producer, Maddie, we went back into the archive of last year’s Monster Fest recording. Pulled out some of the best stories from that recording, and we’ve incorporated them here. Now, make sure you stay tuned even if you’ve heard those stories, because at the very end we will put on the last story from this year because we wanted to finish with all the audience reaction and so forth at the very end. So Monster Fest, one story is coming up and then we close out with the last Monster Fest two story. Again, a big thank you to the people at Small Town Monsters. Make sure to check out all of their [email protected]. Now, back to more great stories, Mr. Seth Breedlove. He is the chief cook and bottle washer, as I always call him, for small town monsters, documentarian, and now conference organizer extraordinaire along with Courtney and Heather and the whole team. They’ve just done a great job. And Seth, I think we owe you a round of applause. So along the idea of a campfire, it’s campfire stories. That’s why you tuned in. We’re going to start with Seth Breedlove. Now, Seth, when we first started talking about all this, I don’t know if you were a believer per se, but you were certainly interested and you were open to this subject matter, but you told me about something that happened to you that I think it really puts you in that believer category, your own sighting. Can you recount it for the folks?

Seth Breedlove (01:00:58):

Yeah, yeah. Hopeful skeptic is the best way to put it. So anyone here who’s seen our series that we did on YouTube called the Bigfoot Project, might be aware of this, but basically there’s a town called Minerva, Ohio that’s relatively close to here. We made a movie about it back in 2015. The Minerva Monster settings were kind of a big deal in the seventies. In 2021, Heather, one of our crew moved to Minerva and moved onto this property that consisted of like 400 acres somewhere outside of Minerva is how we put it. It’s not super close to Minerva, but somewhere outside of Minerva, but it’s a Minerva address. The property does have a long history of activity. Bigfoot, I’m talking about Bigfoot guys. Most of you were probably into the haunted stuff. I’m the boring Bigfoot guy. So most of the activity was, seemed to be Bigfoot related.

(01:02:08):

The property is super interesting. There’s a former native burial mound or burial ground on the property. There’s a very old cemetery there. There’s all this kinds of stuff, and then there’s very patchy woods. Heather started noticing unusual activity sometime within two weeks of moving into the house and the woods around the house, wood knocks yells, things like that. The house is surrounded by other farms, and a lot of these farms are owned by her own family. There’s also her husband Corey. His mom had a sighting, a bigfoot sighting in the winter of 2018 there too. So we knew there’s this long history of settings there. Long story short, we went out to make a film or an episode of the series we were doing called the Bigfoot Project. It was conceived to be a live action podcast that we would go basically hang out in the woods and we would talk to each other and then maybe something would happen, but more than likely it wouldn’t.

(01:03:16):

So our very first weekend out there, we had things started happening. We had a bonfire going. We were sitting around the fire and we had heard a very loud, I say wood knock, but it’s not a wood knock. It was what we’ve come to believe is actually an old rubber oil drum or gas. It’s some sort of large drum up in the woods above the cabin that we were staying in. So we stay in this little hunting cabin, no running water, no electricity or anything, but it sits next to a natural spring and it’s surrounded by some of the more dense forest on the property. So we were sitting around this fire, we heard this loud knock. We ended up having rocks thrown at us that night. Whoops, in the woods. We had multiple wood knocks. We heard running around us while we were up the path.

(01:04:11):

At one point we had our kids. So I had my son, my five-year-old son with me. She had a couple of her younger kids with us, and the kids were all in the cabin sitting on a bunk bed near one of the windows. And at one point something walked up to the window behind where the kids were and Heather’s Husbandman had to scream to scare this thing off. I mean, he literally heard it like crunch, crunch, like walk up to the window. So we knew there was something going on there. So the very next day we took a gator out to hang trail cams around the property to see if we could get any photos, which is probably our biggest mistake honestly. So we were out driving around hanging the trail cams and we crossed a pipeline, and as we were crossing the pipeline, I looked up this clear cut and running across the clear cut was a creature that looked to be like six foot, six five, somewhere in that range.

(01:05:17):

It was almost black, but it was a dark brown color, and you could see muscle movement in the arm. It was sprinting like its arms were pumping as it was running. And I saw it for maybe a 10th of a second. It was not a very long time. It had just cleared the clearing was going into the wood line. When I saw it, I immediately yelled for the guy driving the a TV to stop, but I had already jumped out of the moving a TV by the time I did that. And then I hit the ground and I was on this embankment that runs down to the clear cut. And I was at this weird fall where your arms are pumping, trying to keep yourself from falling forward. And then I just hit this wall of brush, which anyone from Ohio knows is thorns that are just going to kill you. So I had to stop. I couldn’t go up the hill and we could hear this thing crashing around a little bit in the woods, but it eventually became super still and whatever this thing was left the area and we had other activity at the property, but nothing as eventful as the first day and a half that we were actually there.

(01:06:36):

I don’t think we drove them away. The activity on the property is basically stopped at this point. And what’s happened is that the neighboring property has been heavily developed, so we think they’ve been pushed off the pushed the area.

Jim Harold (01:06:50):

So how do you think that has changed you or has it changed you in terms of how you look at your job and documenting all this and talking to now other experiencers? Has it changed the way you view things

Seth Breedlove (01:07:06):

Now? It hasn’t changed the way I view the work we do, but I’ve always viewed Bigfoot a little differently from Flatwoods and the Flatwoods monster or the Moth man. I just have a different view on Sasquatch. I think Sasquatch is very natural animal that exists in our woods.

Jim Harold (01:07:25):

So you don’t believe it’s interdimensional?

Seth Breedlove (01:07:28):

I’m not an interdimensional

Jim Harold (01:07:29):

Guy. I had a guy one time who called me and he had got my phone number. I don’t know how this happened. He says, oh, that’s always fun. He said, Bigfoot’s out there in his mining uranium. I have no idea who this guy was. Never heard from him again. He got my phone number. And it’s like,

Seth Breedlove (01:07:47):

That’s terrifying when that happens. I’ve had that happen.

Jim Harold (01:07:52):

Yeah, my kids always joke about it.

Seth Breedlove (01:07:55):

Yeah,

Jim Harold (01:07:55):

He’s out here and he’s mad and you

Seth Breedlove (01:07:57):

Read it hasn’t impacted, it hasn’t impacted the way I view Sasquatch other than maybe I’m more, I just am a little more serious about wanting to be involved in the research side of it. I’ve always been very much like I’m just a filmmaker documenting this stuff. And now I’m like, well, maybe I should.

Jim Harold (01:08:12):

He’s crossed over

Seth Breedlove (01:08:13):

Guys, crossed over helping fund research or something. So we’re trying to figure out how to

Jim Harold (01:08:18):

Do that. Well, you’re doing great stuff. You’re doing great stuff. And I think everybody, again, let’s give Seth a big hand. Next up is Lexi from Florida. And Lexi, I understand you are a veteran, right? I

Lexie (FL) (01:08:37):

Am, yes. Thank

Jim Harold (01:08:38):

You for your service.

Lexie (FL) (01:08:40):

Absolutely.

Jim Harold (01:08:42):

Yes, yes, yes. And appropriately enough, apparently you saw something very strange at bootcamp.

Lexie (FL) (01:08:52):

I did. So the story happened in Chicago in the Great Lakes, which is where the US Navy Bootcamp is. And this is about bootcamps eight weeks, and this is about six weeks in, and you have to learn how to march in line and in this formation and whatnot. And so we’re in this gym arena, and it’s about seven o’clock at night and I’m tired, and there’s about probably maybe 90 other sailors recruits with me, and the people in the front were getting yelled at because they couldn’t march in line. So I’m just standing there. And at this point, before you marched in this part of the formation, all these sailors would say, the sailors creed, for lack of a better term, it’s a poem the sailors abide by. And we all say it loud and proud, and then we continue on with our formation. And I was just thinking, because I’ve always been into supernatural and creepy things, and I go, this is where a retired sailor who died would be thinking, these recruits aren’t like my recruits.

(01:09:56):

And just totally judging us about messing up and not getting things right. And so I was looking, just looking around, and there were some offices above that. Our essentially drill sergeants would look down and watch us form, kind of like if you were a marching band instructor, you want to see high to make sure the squares and lines are aligned. And so I looked up and the offices were dark because it was a Sunday, so nobody was up there. But then I noticed a light go on, and then it went off again. And I was like, oh, that’s cool, great. And then I felt a tap on the back of my shoulder, and I turned around thinking I messed up that I wasn’t standing where I was supposed to. And I asked the girl behind me, I said, oh man, what did I mess up? And she goes, what are you talking about? I go, you tapped me on the shoulder to put me back in line. And she goes, no, I didn’t. And I was like, oh, great. So I looked back up and I saw a white figure just kind of take a turn in a corner. And so all I can think of is I was at Sailor that messed up that these sailors that I was thinking would be mad at was it was me. They were kind of, Hey, get back in line and pay attention. So

Jim Harold (01:11:08):

Yeah, we’ve heard quite a bit of stories about haunted barracks across the world. People stationed in Germany. We have one, I don’t know if this was in officer housing or something. This woman, her husband went for a run every morning, but one morning she felt her husband in bed, but realized it wasn’t her husband, but it was like this weird doppelganger that was slightly off. But I mean, the thing is that they all see the doppelgangers don’t look quite

Lexie (FL) (01:11:46):

Right. There’s just that’s something a little off,

Jim Harold (01:11:48):

Little bit off.

Lexie (FL) (01:11:49):

All those bases are super creepy. When I was in a school, which is actually when I started listening to you, my husband and I would run to the lighthouse that was on base, and there was definitely some spooky activity that neither of us wanted to admit because we didn’t want to scare the other person. So we got up there and then I go, it’s time to go. And we ran back and he goes, Hey, is everything okay? I go, yeah, I just saw something. And he goes, you saw that too. So there’s definitely a lot of activity that you can find on military bases,

Jim Harold (01:12:17):

And I think it fits the motif. We think about prisons or for lack of a better term, insane asylum, sanitariums, theaters, places that have a lot of emotion, a lot of energy, military barracks. You have young men, young women, too much time, too much time, but also wartime, especially the older facilities and so forth. I mean, it just seems like a perfect place for it. And thank you for sharing your story once again. Thank you for your

Lexie (FL) (01:12:47):

Service. Absolutely. Thank you, Jim. Stay

Jim Harold (01:12:49):

Spooky. Roddy from Kentucky, ghosts in the cemetery. Sounds spooky to me. Tell us about these ghosts in the cemetery.

Roddy (KY) (01:13:00):

Well, my story’s kind of short and sweet. He was going up to Cliffy Falls in Indiana. Not sure if you’ve been there, but we didn’t make it there. The road was all torn up. They’re putting a new road in, couldn’t make it through. The road was closed. So I was like, all right. Well, at that point, it was probably five o’clock, five 30 in the afternoon, we decided to go after I got off work. So we was just driving around and I saw an old cemetery sign because in Kentucky we have those signs saying historic site two miles down the road. So we went over there and it was almost nighttime, about six o’clock, and we got out the car and read the sign. Basically the newest grave there is probably from the early 19 hundreds. So he got out, walked around. Then all of a sudden it was kids playing around and there was no houses around, no tent, no nothing, no trailer.

(01:13:56):

And it was like, wow. It’s kind of strange. It was kids running around with a dog. There’s four kids and a dog, some sticks. That’s weird. And I looked at ’em and I noticed, well, they’re wearing sacks for shirts, so that’s not normal. Not nowadays, maybe in the twenties. It was 18 hundreds it was. So I kind of walked around and my girlfriend was with me, and she tried to talk to him. She was kind worried. There was no house, no nothing, random kids in this old cemetery. And she was talking to him and they looked at her giggled and continued running around. And I was like, well, we’re going to get out of here because this is odd. It’s dark, random kids and sticks and ack. So we turned around and started walking, and then all of a sudden these kids run into the woods and poof, they’re gone. And I was like, this is kind of crazy. So we left, and that’s basically it. And it’s not a crazy story, but that’s the only real paranormal thing that’s really happened to me that I know of. And it brought me to where I am now reading and researching cryp dudes and paranormal stuff. I didn’t expect to see kids, dogs and sticks.

Jim Harold (01:15:21):

Do you think it was maybe some kind of time slip since they were wearing burlap sacks or whatever it

Roddy (KY) (01:15:25):

Was? That’s what I’m thinking. I don’t know. I haven’t done much research into it. I don’t know if maybe years ago some tragedy happened over there, maybe.

Jim Harold (01:15:36):

Well, we’ve had that before in the show. Some of you who listen, might remember, we had a young lady who was on, I think from the Atlanta, Georgia area, and her and a bunch of friends, they got together, they lived sound like in a development, and they went back in the woods and they saw this clearing, this really old Victorian style house. They’d never noticed it before. And they saw a kid in his mom, the kid was in knee pants, they would’ve worn from 1900 to 1930 or something. And the mom was dressed in older kind of clothes, and the boy was looking at them and the mom pulled them away. So a few days later, they said, oh, let’s go back. Let’s check this place out. Let’s see what’s going on. And they went there and there was the foundation of a house, but not a house. So did they gaze into the past? Maybe like you did, maybe Roddy, thank you for being on the show and stay spooky. So next up, we have a young lady from Kentucky, the Bluegrass State, and I love this story. She came up and we were chatting over in the hall over there with the vendors and she was telling me a little bit about it. And I think you’re in store for a good one. Mallory lived in a haunted schoolhouse. Mallory, tell us about your story.

Mallory (KY) (01:17:04):

Okay, I’m going to preface it. My parents in 2007 bought abandoned schoolhouse in our small hometown, and it was built in 1909. It was the first schoolhouse to ever have running water, bathrooms, fountains, the whole shebang. Now, it wasn’t massive. It wasn’t huge, but it wasn’t small enough for a small town to house all the schools. I’ll tell you about the first incident that I had at that schoolhouse, and I’ll tell you about the scariest incident. The first incident after we moved in took 200 truckloads of trash out of this building. People junk it out. Over the years, haunted houses were in there, all kinds of scary stuff as you can imagine, people breaking in. But we cleaned out a room and we were finally living in the house and the school. And the first thing that happened is I wake up in the middle of the night and one of the classroom doors was open.

(01:17:51):

Now I know for sure my parents locked it. I mean, we were in a new building in town, you got to lock your stuff. So we locked that door, it was open, couldn’t find my dog. My dog was missing. I’m looking everywhere trying to find this dog, trying to find this dog. I end up fighting the dog, hiding in the crate. Never happened before, ever. So I’m like, okay, the dog’s scared. I’m a little scared. I’m a young high school freshman. I was like, oh, I’m just going back to bed. So I go back to bed, and when I wake up in the morning, my mom’s like, what happened? And I was like, what do you mean what happened? She goes, all our utensils are gone. Everything, all our utensils are gone. Wow, they’re missing. We never found them, by the way, but they just disappeared.

(01:18:33):

And then the next thing, the scariest thing that ever happened to me was as we lived in the school, we felt like there was two things going on. There was something evil, and there was something that was kind of, I would say lonely. It was like a lonely boy or something that lived in the school. It loved my mom. Well, as I got older, my mom started taking vacations away from the kids, get a break. But as she left, things would start happening to me. It did not like me. It did not like when my mom paid attention to me. It did not like if anyone else had attention besides it on her. So one night I was sleeping and they were actually in Florida, and I wake up to my covers being ripped off of me, and I’m trying to scream. I’m trying to figure out what the heck is happening, and it’s pulling and pulling and pulling. And finally I said, get out. Do not bug me anymore.

Jim Harold (01:19:25):

So at this point, it was a full blown Poltergeist because if it starts moving stuff by definition,

Mallory (KY) (01:19:32):

Yes. And after that happens, the next night I was by myself again late at night watching tv. The lights come on in the kitchen, which was frequent. At this point. I’m like, oh, this is normal. For some reason, the lights came on and I was like, you’re not going to scare me tonight. And so I stood and I talked to this ghost entity spirit, whatever you want to call it, and I basically said, I am no longer going to be bugged by you and you’re never going to bug me again, or I’m just going to get rid of you. So after that, things calmed down for me. But every now and again, you still have stories. Unfortunately, we sold the school and there’s still stories coming out of it. If you check on Facebook, there’s still stories coming out, all the scary stuff going on or weird stuff if you would say. But it was definitely an interesting childhood growing up in a haunted schoolhouse.

Jim Harold (01:20:20):

Indeed. Indeed. Now, what do you know about the history of the schoolhouse and in terms of maybe, do you have any theories based on any research on who or what it could have been?

Mallory (KY) (01:20:31):

So it was like everything. I don’t know. People owned it and were just like, Hey, we’re going to make it into a radio host in one section. Hey, haunted house, hey, hospital for a little bit. Hey, we’re going to do this, this, this. We had costumes from when the kids were in school there, still had it after almost a hundred years. There’s costumes in there with real fur and all that good stuff. Handmade costume was beautiful. My take on it, this is my theory, the scariest room was the principal’s office. And I don’t think back in the day, they weren’t the nicest. It had a bad vibe. No one slept in that room. No one could stand in that room at all. So I think there was something that was really bad, but I think there was something super lonely and it just loved the mother figure that my mom was, and it just did not appreciate anyone else in the house besides

Jim Harold (01:21:26):

My mom. So do you think it was a child? Do you think it was? I

Mallory (KY) (01:21:30):

Think to me, we always called it Harvey. I don’t know if you guys seen the old movie Harvey with the Puah James. So that’s what we called him Harvey, and was always just like, Hey, the little boy. He crawled in mom’s bed one night and he was like, mom’s like he’s here now. I was like, oh, okay. All right. That’s cool. We’re just going to keep it real. It’s not that scary. But it loved the motherly thing. It never got the motherly thing. It just wanted the motherly thing. And I was a teenager. It was like, what are you doing here? Get out of here. I love your mom.

Jim Harold (01:22:02):

It was like the ghost, your siblings, how you argue with your siblings. But it was a ghost.

Mallory (KY) (01:22:07):

Exactly. It was picking on me occasionally until I had enough,

Jim Harold (01:22:12):

But no sign of it since it hasn’t followed anybody. Nothing like

Mallory (KY) (01:22:15):

That. Well, I will say I have a younger niece. She’s five years younger than me, and she did Ouija boards in the school. I never did that. I don’t like that bad juju. She to this day has issues. She’ll walk into a room, no light flickers, no matter where she goes. It’s like this bad energy just follows her from that place. And it has till this very day. She’ll come to my house and I live in another state and all of a sudden the lights will flicker and she’s like, it’s here. It followed her.

Jim Harold (01:22:47):

Very interesting indeed. Mallory, very interesting indeed. Thank you so much for being a part of the campfire and stay spooky.

Mallory (KY) (01:22:54):

I will. Thank you.

Jim Harold (01:22:59):

And now we engage in a bit of time. Travel back to Monster Fest two. Riley has Now you had three stories here, RI I’m going to ask you, I think we have about five minutes left. We may not be able to get to everybody unfortunately, but I think you had a couple of Bigfoot stories, so if you can get those in four minutes, that would be great, or as best you can. I think I

Riley (01:23:22):

Could do that.

Jim Harold (01:23:23):

Okay, go for it.

Riley (01:23:24):

All right. So the first time I’m in Codwell at my grandfather’s property, he has about 300 acres an hour away from town. That’s

Jim Harold (01:23:32):

Caldwell, Ohio. Yes, sir. Okay.

Riley (01:23:34):

And it’s all thick wooded. He’s on a mountain top, but the rest of it, you won’t get near a road for two miles. He’s that far down. And I had a tendency of just stealing the quad and just running around the trails. So I did one night, I want to say it was like 10, 10 30, I go behind the cabin and then there’s this U bend that goes downhill, and then it goes into this runoff that’ll go about 200 yards of just open. So I’ll just do stupid stuff and I’ll go real fast up through there. And then there’s a small narrow pathway where you go into the woods. So I’m going in there at 38 miles an hour, and then I almost hit a tree that fell down recently. So I hit the brakes. I can’t turn around, so I just have to put it in reverse.

(01:24:22):

I can’t see anything in the back. So I finally get back out into the open, make a quick U-turn, and then I start heading back that way. When you go in the other way, the hills on the right, you go up and there’s the field that go to the cabin. And on the bottom side there’s this U-turn that wraps around the set of pines and then oaks off to the side. We have a tree hut that sits right in the corner between the pines and the oaks, and then there’s a clear pathway you can see for maybe a couple yards. So I just go down there for a brief moment and I see these eyes, I stop for a minute, I just think it’s a deer, whatever. I get up past through there and it starts to go towards my east at probably what seemed like a hundred miles an hour. He was just there and gone. This big massive shadow that was probably 30 yards from me just sits there, gets up and runs.

Jim Harold (01:25:25):

So do you think it was flesh and blood or do you think it was some kind of interdimensional traveler going that fast?

Riley (01:25:32):

Not sure, to be honest with you. I was 14. I didn’t know what I saw. I just thought I was going crazy out in the woods and all the creatures are out.

Jim Harold (01:25:41):

Wow. A hundred miles.

Riley (01:25:42):

But that same story, what I saw the next day, grandpa went out of town, he went out drinking with his girlfriend, so he came back up.

Jim Harold (01:25:52):

Yeah, grandpa.

Riley (01:25:57):

But he’s crazy. And you’ll believe every story he tells you because he just has that confidence in it and he doesn’t skip a beat. Well, that same night, me and my dad were up there. It’s two miles from the road and it’s all gravel. So he starts to go uphill and there’s another eye witness with him. So when you’re going up the hill, there’s a massive drop off that goes 30 feet, so nothing’s getting between there. I’m about two feet off to your left, and then on our right there’s a hilltop field that slopes over and then you don’t see anything. He swears up and down and he gets over this ridge. Here comes this eight foot black bear. He said on two legs, darting over, it seemed like four long strides and it was gone.

Jim Harold (01:26:45):

Wow. So that kind of ties in with your story. I thought

Riley (01:26:48):

It was a little spooky, but dad’s like, you’re a crazy old man. Ain’t no way.

Jim Harold (01:26:52):

You had one other, if you can tell it quickly, another one with your dogs,

Riley (01:26:57):

Right? I did. I was playing fetch with them after doing demolition at our new property in Ravenna, about a couple miles away from an army arsenal they had over there. So it’s like 10 30. I have a little glow in the dark ball. I’m out with them. A pack of coyotes start going off 250 yards behind me, and they’re curious, whatever. There’s a couple dogs going off, whatever, no big deal. Five minutes in, they start to squeal and yip and distress. It’d take maybe no more than six minutes, and then it just goes all silent. I didn’t think anything of it. They were probably just on the heat with a rabbit or something. And so I’m finally wrapping it up. My German shepherd was looking directly behind the car and he was just sitting still, and he starts to do the mohawk. He spikes up, he’s ready to rock and roll, and then my huskies getting riled up and they’re too stupid not to get scared of anything.

(01:27:56):

They’ll go right for it. They both whimpered into the car and I couldn’t get ’em back out. So I turned the car around and had my brights on. There’s this one big pine with a couple trees or tree ranches that dirt over a trail. There were about seven feet as a reference. There is a two yellow greenish glowing eyes the size of a golf ball right underneath this branch with most of its torso showing behind this branch. So I started going towards it and it just starts for the hill. So I wanted to see what it was. So I get back there, I get stuck in a foot of mud. I can’t get out. I finally did, but there’s this sulfur manure smell afterwards. I couldn’t make anything else of it, and I was told I was crazy.

Jim Harold (01:28:43):

There you go. I don’t think so. I think you’re seeing some strange things out there in the woods of Ohio. Thank you for telling your story. Thank you. And just like that, it’s a campfire. I want to say a couple things. Thanks Dar. Thank you for everything. This gentleman, Nick has been sitting here all day helping with the various podcasts. Please give him a nice one on the applause. Thank you, Nick. Let’s thank all the people with small town monsters. They’ve done such a great job. It’s been a great event. Thank you.

(01:29:34):

And I saved the most important for last. When you’re doing shows like this, I’m actually getting a little choked up here, a little over clumped. You’re in a room by yourself and we work hard on these shows, and it means so much to see people like you come out and take a minute out of your day or your time, spend your money for a ticket, come up to the table and say you enjoy the shows, and it just means a lot to me. Thank you so much. I want to talk to you next time on The Campfire, and somehow, because I got so taken up in the live event, I forgot to say stay spooky. So stay safe. Happy 4th of July, and stay spooky. Bye-Bye, everybody.

Announcer (01:30:27):

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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