Strange premonitions and a Bigfoot sighting highlight this edition of Campfire!
TRANSCRIPT
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CARSON: And then finally someone who works there grabs me by the shoulders, looks me in the face, and says, “All the flights are cancelled. All the planes are grounded” – and I woke up.
JIM HAROLD: That’s Carson from California, telling us about a terrifying nightmare and how it came true. This, another Ouija story, more hauntings on this week’s Campfire.
Welcome to our gathering tonight. Here we share stories of ordinary people who have experienced extraordinary things. Sit back, relax, and warm yourself by Jim Harold’s Campfire.
JIM HAROLD: Happy Halloween, and welcome to the Campfire. I am Jim Harold and so glad to be with you once again. We have a lot of great spooky stories. We have, as you heard in the teaser, a tremendous premonition call and another premonition call – close to home here at the Spooky Studio. We have another fantastic Ouija board story. We have stories of hauntings and much more. Perfect for this spooky season and time of year.
Please stay tuned to the end of the episode for a special birthday shoutout. We want to make sure to tell you that. So stay tuned for that and a whole lot of Halloween and spooky fun. And here we go. It is time for many spooky stories on the Campfire. Enjoy!
Melina is on the Spooky Studio line from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and she and her fiancé, Javier, have been listening for about five years. She says they listen regularly on their lunch breaks, and I think that is just so cool. What I also think is cool is Melina is bringing us the goods. She’s going to tell us a story from college and a Ouija board and the aftermath. Melina, welcome to the show. Thank you and Javier for listening for all this time. I appreciate it. Please tell us this story.
MELINA: Hi, Jim. Thanks for having me. This story happened about 10 years ago, when I was 18. It starts off I am going to college in West Texas, and me and my roommate are at a friend’s off-campus apartment. Just randomly, someone suggested we buy a Ouija board. Normally I’m very terrified of Ouija boards. It’s not my thing. But this time I was just like, “Yeah, let’s do it.”
JIM HAROLD: “Why not?”
MELINA: Right. We went to Toys ‘R’ Us, actually, and bought one. We came back to their apartment and we really weren’t taking it seriously. I don’t think anybody really thought it was real. We were saying really stupid stuff, like wanting to speak to Rick James and stuff like that. [laughs] Obviously, now I know that’s really disrespectful, but at the time I was just a dumb kid.
After that, me and my roommate drive back to our dorm and we’re in the parking lot and we’re sitting there for a while, talking, and I notice on the other side of the parking lot, it looks like a woman with really long hair over her face and a man with a top hat kind of deal. I’m thinking, “Okay, maybe my eyes are playing tricks on me. It’s dark.” They were there for a while, and it looked like the woman’s hair was blowing in the wind, so I’m like, “Okay, I’m on a campus. Someone’s probably just being dumb and playing a prank or something like that.” I didn’t think much about it.
Then we go back to our dorm. The setup of our dorm was pretty 1980s, I guess. We had our two twin beds and there was a table in between, and at the end of our beds we had these closets that have heavy wooden doors. They were kind of broken off of the wheel up top, so we had to keep them open for the most part. They were really hard to close. In between that, we had a vanity with lights that we usually kept on at night. That’s important.
So we go back to our room and my roommate is like, “Hey, did you see that weird guy with that hat out there?” I was like, “Oh my God, she actually saw that? I wasn’t crazy.” But we thought it was nothing, just people being dumb, and wrote it off. Now we’re back and we have the Ouija board and it’s becoming a ritual that we have. After class every day, we’re coming and playing it all the time, looking for any opportunity to play it.
But then weird stuff starts happening. When we go under streetlights, they turn off. At first we thought it was a coincidence, because I’ve never seen a streetlight die, but we’re like, “Wow, a streetlight just died for the first time ever,” and we would start seeing it constantly. And the board would say really weird personal stuff that neither of us knew about each other. Then we started seeing the same woman with the long hair and the man with the top hat in our closets.
JIM HAROLD: Oh man, oh man.
MELINA: It was so scary. I’m sleeping one night and I notice the man in my closet and I’m like, “Nah, there’s no way. My eyes must be playing tricks on me.” And we have the light on on our vanity, so it’s not completely dark. But I’m like, “Maybe there’s shadows casting or something like that.” Then I turn away from it and I see a woman in her closet. I’m like, “I’m just seeing things.”
I’m freaked out, so I go under my blankets, try to hide, and she texts me, “Oh my God, do you see them in the closet right now?” Mentally, I just lost it because she confirmed that was there. You can kind of be like, “Maybe that didn’t really happen,” but then another person says it, unprovoked – it was just really crazy.
Because we kept playing the Ouija board, I guess, they started coming every night, and at some point they started getting closer and closer to our beds. We tried closing the closet, but when we closed the closet they would stand outside the closet, so we’re like, “Let’s keep the closet open, try to give us some distance.”
Really, I think the stopping point for us was I had this really weird dream one time. I can’t remember what the dream was about at all, but I just remember I wake up throwing up all over my floor, and when I look over at my roommate, she’s in the corner, screaming, crying, and she said the woman came out of the closet and touched me. We’re like, “We shouldn’t do this stuff anymore.” We had to look up how to get rid of it.
We’re researching, and we find something about getting prayer candles, so we go to Walmart and get – they’re like tall glass flutes and the candle is deep in there so the wind can’t blow it out. We start placing them all around our room when we go to bed to try to, I don’t know, ward off the people in our closets. But then they start going out one by one, which was already freaky enough that one went out, but they all started going out. We run out of our dorm screaming and crying, and we go in her car and we sleep in front of the church. That started to become a more regular thing, us sleeping in her car in front of a church.
We also saw only that we could burn the board, and that would get rid of everything, so we’re trying to find a place to burn something and not get in trouble. We’re in the backroads – it’s in Texas, so it’s a dirt road, and we’re trying to light it. We’d come and tried to do this multiple times and it’d never light. We were thinking maybe it was too windy. During this time also, my roommate is getting more and more aggressive about not burning the board, even though we’re also very on the same boat about “we need to burn this and get rid of it because it’s getting too crazy.”
We’re like, “Maybe we can find something where the wind won’t touch it.” Our friend has a grill, so we go to our friend, the original friend who’s off-campus that we played the Ouija board at. We go and ask them if we can use their grill. We tell them what’s up, and they say the whole time, they’ve been seeing stuff in their apartment too, but nobody ever said anything because they didn’t want us to think that they’re crazy, and we didn’t say anything to them. So I guess we were all in it together at this point.
We tried to burn it on the grill and it would not light fire. We threw the whole big bottle of lighter fluid. When it finally did catch, it took literally – I’m not exaggerating – like five hours for this thing to burn. I’ve googled since then what they’re made out of, like maybe some kind of explanation, and all I could find is cardboard. So if anybody knows, I would love to know.
JIM HAROLD: Melina, you may not have heard this; this was the very early days of Campfire, but we had people who said that they tried to burn Ouija boards and they didn’t burn. And by the way, if anybody’s out there considering burning anything, be extremely careful what you’re doing. I don’t want anybody setting their house on fire or hurting themselves or someone else if they’re setting things on fire. So be careful out there, whatever you do. But the point is, I’ve had people say before that they’ve tried to burn Ouija boards and they’ve had a hard time doing it.
MELINA: That’s so creepy. So after we finish our finals, the board is burned, but we really didn’t go back to our dorm. We were staying at our friend’s house or sleeping in the car. When we finished finals, the year wasn’t quite over, but we decided to go stay at her parents’ house because they were a lot closer than mine.
But when we get there, I guess the lady had followed us to her house, which is nuts. We would see her in her bedroom, and we would start to spend our days literally collecting holy water, looking for religious items that were going to protect us, going to churches to try to get blessings. My mom even sent me a blessed rosary because it was getting so scary.
It got so out of the hand to the point where my parents sent me some plane tickets so I could go fly home. And that’s what happened. I went home, and I haven’t seen anything since. Somebody told us not to talk about it and it would go away, so I literally haven’t talked about it in years. Probably five people know, but I guess everyone’s going to know now. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: Just us. Well, thank you for sharing this, Melina. I don’t believe the Ouija board itself is evil, but I think it’s like anything. A chainsaw is a great tool if you know what you’re doing and you go cut down a tree. But maybe not so great if you don’t know what you’re doing. [laughs]
MELINA: Definitely.
JIM HAROLD: Well, thank you again, so much, and thank Javier. I wish you both the best in your life together, and thank you for being fans of the Campfire.
MELINA: Thank you so much. Take care.
JIM HAROLD: Lilah is on the Spooky Studio line from Vermont, and she’s going to tell us about a very strange apartment and what happened once she moved in. She’s been listening for a couple of years; she’s a big fan of the shows, and we’re so glad to have her on the program today. Lilah, welcome to the Campfire and please tell us this story.
LILAH: Hi, Jim. Thank you so much for having me on. The story comes from my sophomore year of college in Burlington, Vermont. Currently a senior now. I had just moved back into my apartment. I found it on Facebook with two other girls from my college, and because I was coming back from the pandemic – I took a semester off – I had to find housing pretty quick, so I didn’t really look much into it and I just picked the first place.
A little background on this apartment. A lot of the apartments in Burlington are in these really old houses. Mine was in one of those. We had the top floor, and it almost could’ve been an attic in its old iteration because it had these low ceilings and these small rooms. One of the most notable features of the apartment was this long hallway that stretched all the way from the living room to the back bedrooms. I’ve always been really spooked – as a child, I think I watched too many horror movies. So when I originally moved in and I felt this overwhelming feeling of someone watching me every time I walked down the hallway, I ignored it because I thought it was just my imagination.
One of the first experiences I had in the apartment was on my second night sleeping there, I had one of my friends staying with me because his apartment wasn’t yet ready to be moved into, and I was sleeping on the bed and he was sleeping on the floor next to me, and I heard my name whispered. It was right in my ear and very clear. I nudged my friend like, “Robert, what do you want? Why are you messing with me?” He didn’t respond, so I nudged him again. He turned over and was annoyed and confused. “What do you want? I didn’t say your name.”
So I just ignored that and thought maybe I dreamed it. But as I was going right back to sleep, he said my name again. I asked him what he wanted, and he asked me why I’d whispered his name – and I had clearly not.
I’d never had a paranormal experience in my life, so for the first few weeks I lived there, I assumed when I would hear steps outside my room at night or these bangs and shifts in the ceiling or the hallway, I just assumed it was my own imagination. But after a couple weeks of being there, and especially after me and Robert had heard our names whispered, I decided to bring it up to my roommates.
When I half-jokingly mentioned that I thought the apartment might be haunted – because I didn’t know them that well – my roommate gave me this weird look and was like, “So you feel it too?”
JIM HAROLD: Ooh.
LILAH: She told me they had always joked that the apartment was haunted, but when she described the past stories, it seemed like a little bit less of a joke and more of something they had just gotten used to.
One of her stories was that her past roommate, the one that had lived in my room, was an artist, and she had this assignment to do, so she bought a canvas. She came into the living room one night and was really angry because she said that my roommate had messed with her canvas. My roommate told her she had no idea what she was talking about, she had no reason to mess with her canvas. The old roommate brought in the canvas, and clearly painted on the side of it were the numbers “1936.” My roommate had not drawn this, and this had clearly not been there before because she bought it from Michael’s.
Another experience was what my roommate described as a sleep paralysis dream. But as we continued to have experiences in the apartment, we started to wonder if this had not been the case. She said she woke up one night in a cold sweat to see this dark shape of a little girl just standing at the corner of her bed, peering at her. She didn’t go away until she went back to sleep. I’ve never seen this girl, but my roommate always referred back to this dream, so it seemed like it had really shaken her up.
Another oddity of the apartment was the bathroom. It sat at the middle of this long hallway, and as you would go into the bathroom, you would feel this pressing weight of someone watching you from either side. Once you got in the bathroom, there was another oddity: at random times, with no explanation, the fan in the bathroom would make this loud mechanical screaming sound. It wasn’t consistent, and it almost seemed like the fan was broke, but we got it checked out by our landlord so many times we can’t even explain. It was just this loud, high-pitched screaming. It wasn’t consistent, and oftentimes it would come on at night. Those midnight bathroom breaks, it would be this long, eerie, mechanical screaming.
One of the seminal experiences in this whole saga was what me and my friend like to call “the egg salad incident.”
JIM HAROLD: The egg salad incident.
LILAH: Yes. [laughs] My friend Robert, who had stayed with me that one time, he and I and my roommate were sitting at the kitchen table. I was in this big egg salad phase, like the good Jew I am, and I was making toast with egg salad. I had placed the container on the counter and put the knife on top of the container to go and eat. We were deep in conversation, but at the same time, we all paused and looked over at the container at the same time to see the knife lift itself off the container and slam to the ground.
JIM HAROLD: Oh man. Whoa.
LILAH: The sound was deafening, Jim. And the knife landed on the ground with this huge splatter of egg salad around it to look like blood. It could’ve fallen on its own, but I have to mention, because we always do, that the container was pretty far away from the edge of the counter, plus it was just the way that we were all drawn to it. It felt like someone was trying to tell us something.
The scariest experience I had was right before I moved out of my apartment. I was reading before bed and I had dropped my bookmark through the crack of the bed and the wall, because my bed was pushed right up against the wall. With my phone flashlight, I went to look under the bed, and as I was under there, I noticed this small white card poking out of the bottom of my radiator. I had never noticed this before. I kept a lot of stuff under my bed, so I went down there a lot.
I pulled the card out and it was a funeral card for a student that had died at a nearby college in 2016. It had his picture on it and it had this little beautiful Irish prayer on the back. I was spooked, Jim.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, that would spook me out. Did the student live there? Ooh, ooh, so many thoughts.
LILAH: I texted my roommate and I was like, “Did you do this? This is such a mean prank!” She had no idea what I was talking about. She had not put it there. So that was pretty scary.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, between the knife and the egg salad and then that – that would be almost the last straw. It’s like, okay, what’s going on here?
LILAH: Yeah. Thankfully, I was moving out soon. [laughs] But when I was living in the apartment, one thing was that my friend always called me really crazy for believing that it was haunted. My friend Robert, who was there for the whispering and was there for the egg salad. Obviously, I had to tell my friends about everything that was happening because, I mean, funeral cards were being pulled out of my radiator. How could I not talk about that?
But I saw my old roommate again, and we were going back over stories of the ghost, and my friend Robert was there. He took this time to tell me that he had known to himself that the apartment was haunted the whole time and felt genuine fear being in there ever since the egg salad knife had slammed to the ground. He just hadn’t wanted to tell me, as he was too scared and didn’t want to scare me. So that gave me the chills.
And then the last and final note of the story is that my friend’s sister had lived in the apartment a year before me, and apparently two of her roommates – and then three, counting the girl that I was leasing from – had all moved out of that apartment, and my room specifically, for various mental health reasons. They had this fun little name for it. They called it “the breakdown room.”
So I now believe that this ghost called my room his home. I don’t think he was a sinister presence, but I think he was really lonely and he wanted to make sure that the person who was living there knew he was there. And I can respect that to an extent.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah. That funeral card, ooh. But I mean, the fact that a knife picked itself up – just a lot of stuff going on. Lilah, thank you so much for joining us. One quick question. When you now go to find a place – and sometimes you just can’t, but do you try to find out a little more about the place before you sign on the dotted line?
LILAH: I definitely haven’t done any research, but before choosing the apartment I’m in now, me and my roommates checked in with each other and unpacked the vibes before moving in. [laughs] And I can happily say that this apartment is not haunted.
JIM HAROLD: Well, thanks again. I appreciate it very, very much for being on the show. Stay spooky.
LILAH: Thank you, Jim.
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JIM HAROLD: Harry is on the line from Texas. You know, it turns out that people sometimes think our show is just about ghost stories, and certainly that’s a big part of what we do, but we like every area of the paranormal and the supernatural: cryptids, ghosts, headscratchers, and this subject – and we’ve got two stories today from Harry, and those are UFO stories, and he’s going to tell them to us. Harry, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us, and I hope everyone takes your example if they have any UFO stories and calls in.
HARRY: I hope so too.
JIM HAROLD: So Harry, tell us what happened.
HARRY: All right. I grew up in Western Pennsylvania. My family arrived in the United States from Germany in 1952, and they all settled in that area. That’s where I was raised, and I had a lot of fun back there. But this incident took place in the summer of 1969. I was five years old, almost six. It was a summer evening, and my younger sister, my dad, and I were at a family picnic all day. As it got later, my dad finally said, “We’re going to take you over to your grandparents’ house.”
We drove to my grandparents’ house. It was probably about two o’clock. We knocked at the front door because it was locked, and there was no answer. So we went around back and we found my grandparents sitting in the backyard, having a tea and just talking. We joined them and we were sitting out there for a while, and I noticed above the house, there was a red and white, very brightly lit object. To describe it from 50-some years ago, it looked like one of those red-and-white dinner mints that was hovering in the air above the house.
We were seated with our backs to the house, so as we looked up, the object was basically centered perfectly above the peak of my grandparents’ house. We watched it for a minute, and I was just fascinated with this. My grandparents were laughing and talking. My grandfather speculated that it was a hot air balloon from the local county fair. Even as a kid, I thought, “That’s not a balloon.” But I was five, and what did I know?
So we watched the object, and it started to slowly drift over the house and we lost sight of it. We got up, we walked around the house out to the front street, and lo and behold, we weren’t alone. There were four or five other neighbors, and they were all in their front yards, looking at this object and talking and pointing. We just watched this thing slowly gliding off to the southwest toward the town. We could see the town lights in the distance.
Just about as soon as we arrived, this object’s lights turned off. It was still there, and I remember vividly clear, it was a saucer-shaped silhouette.
JIM HAROLD: Wow.
HARRY: I always thought I was a pretty keen observer of adults, and as soon as that happened, my grandparents and my father got very quiet. They pretty much just ushered us back into the house and we didn’t speak of it again.
The interesting thing is that many years later, I suddenly had a recollection of this incident. I was talking to my grandfather, who, by the way, was a World War II combat vet, so he’d seen a lot of things. He was not easily flustered. He was a very levelheaded guy. I said, “Hey Grandpa, remember that UFO we saw that one time, that one summer night?” He said, “Yeah, we’re not discussing that.” I thought that was a very strange thing to hear him say because normally no subject was off limits. He would discuss almost anything.
JIM HAROLD: Whoa.
HARRY: I knew him well enough to know that there was no pushing him on this. A few years ago, maybe 10 years ago, I asked my dad about it. I said, “Hey, what do you remember about that? Do you remember that night?” He looked at me with the strangest look and he said, “I do not want to discuss that.”
JIM HAROLD: Whoa.
HARRY: Yeah, it was very weird. But as a kid, it was more of an entertainment thing. It was very interesting. That was the summer the astronauts landed on the moon, so there was a lot of space interest. But this object was very, very interesting. The fact that it was so brightly lit up – I mean, it was lit up, it was not hiding or anything. It was in plain view. It was only when the lights went out we saw that beautiful, perfectly symmetrical saucer shape.
JIM HAROLD: Wow, that’s something else. That’s really interesting. Again, I think the most interesting part of that whole story is the fact that both your father and your grandfather did not want to talk about it.
HARRY: Yeah, they were absolutely firm, and I knew them well enough to know that when they say something like that, that’s the end of the discussion.
JIM HAROLD: Do you think there was an additional piece of the experience perhaps that they had that you didn’t see or feel?
HARRY: I don’t know. I never thought about that. I suppose it’s possible, but I never got anything out of them. My father’s still alive, and as far as I know – I can try again someday and ask him, but he made it pretty clear he did not want to discuss that.
JIM HAROLD: And that wasn’t the only UFO sighting you had in your family, right?
HARRY: No, it wasn’t. The next one is a story that belongs to my parents. It’s actually not my story, but I was peripherally involved in it. This incident also took place in Western Pennsylvania, in February of 1976. I was about 12 at that time. It was a winter night. My sister and I were already in bed. It was probably after nine o’clock. My mom was talking on the phone with her sister, and my stepdad was about to take our dog for a walk. By the way, our dog’s name was Spooky. Thought I’d point that out.
JIM HAROLD: [laughs] Cool.
HARRY: He was about to take her for a walk. That was his routine. So he put the dog on a leash, he went outdoors – there was snow on the ground. It was a calm night, as I recall. He went down the driveway, out to the street, and he walked up the hill. About a quarter mile up the hill, there was a dirt road to the left. He took that road back to a field. Once he reached that field, he would always let the dog off the leash and let her just run free for a while until she had enough.
So he did that. It was pitch black. It was a dark winter night. He said the dog was running around, enjoying herself in the snow, but all of a sudden she just stopped and started barking furiously towards the woods. He was thinking she must’ve heard something or seen something, and he said that within a moment, a large craft rose above the tree line, and the dog went berserk. She came running back toward my stepdad and she hid behind him, looking in the direction of this craft.
He said this craft basically rose above the tree line and then it slowly started gliding toward him. With the dog behind him, he reached back, he put her back on the leash, and he retreated to the path and back to the street, and he returned to the house. Once he was back in the house, my mom was still on the phone, and he told her, “You’ve got to come see this. There’s a flying saucer out here.” She said, “Are you nuts?” He goes, “No, you’ve got to see this.” He said he could hear my aunt’s voice on the phone say, “Did he say flying saucer?” My mom said, “Yeah,” and they both started laughing hysterically.
But my stepdad wasn’t having any of it, so he reached over and hung up the phone and he grabbed my mom and guided her to the side door and outside. She was complaining because it was so cold, and he said, “No, you need to see this.” So they went way back up the street to the field and they were out there in the middle of the snowy field, and there was nothing. She said, “This is ridiculous. It’s freezing cold. Why did you do this?” He goes, “Just give it a second.”
And sure enough, this craft once again rose above the trees and glided toward them in the field. He said this time, this thing was big. He said it actually settled low. It never touched the ground; it hovered above the ground. It was absolutely silent, and it was pretty well-lit from within. He said there was like a cockpit of sorts on top, and they could see into this interior room, but there was nobody in there. He goes, “Your mom actually walked around it and looked at it, and she got a better view of it.” She said she could actually see from a certain angle that there was instrumentation in there. It was a very well-lit space, but there were no occupants she could see.
When she was finished with her little inspection, she said the craft actually rose up and it started to glide over them toward the path which led to the street. So they followed it, and my stepdad ran down the hill and grabbed the keys to the car, drove up the street to pick up my mom – because she kept it in sight – and then they drove along the residential neighborhood street and followed it to a nearby highway. They drove about 10 or 11 miles following this thing, and they were talking the entire time, like how amazing this was and how odd this was.
At a certain point they realized, “Oh my gosh, we left the kids at home in bed. We’ve got to go back.” About that very moment, my mom said that if she hadn’t been looking at it, she would’ve sworn that it had just disappeared in place. But she was actually looking at it and she said it took off with tremendous speed and disappeared. Just absolutely disappeared from view.
JIM HAROLD: Huh. Wow. Both those stories are really remarkable. Did you ever think that maybe – some people say that they or their families draw these things in. Have you ever considered that? In other words, that something’s coming to visit you guys? I know that sounds kind of out there, but have you ever considered that?
HARRY: I did. I’ve thought about that. In my mind, they’re spaced so far apart, and other than me, no two people were involved in either story. Just members of the same family. I’ve thought about it; I don’t get that feeling because nothing else UFO-related has happened to me as far as I know. I wish it would. I keep my eye on the sky, but I’ve really not seen anything remarkable like this.
The thing is, my parents are very German, they’re very sensible people, they’re not prone to excitement. In fact, the funny thing was the next morning I woke up and went downstairs and they were sitting there having coffee and my stepdad said, “Boy, you missed some excitement last night.” I said, “Oh yeah? What was that?” He goes, “We saw a flying saucer.” I said, “Thanks a lot,” because I had just gotten a telescope for Christmas. I said, “I could’ve brought my telescope out.” He goes, “Oh, you wouldn’t need a telescope to see this. It was right in front of us.”
I was so upset that they didn’t wake me up. He goes, “We didn’t have time. It all happened so fast.” Then he told me the whole story and my jaw hit the floor. I’m like, “You’ve got to be kidding me. I missed that?” They could’ve yelled. They could’ve said, “Wake up!” But they didn’t.
JIM HAROLD: Fascinating stories. Thank you so much for sharing them tonight on the Campfire.
HARRY: Thank you for having me, Jim. Stay spooky.
JIM HAROLD: Next up on the Spooky Studio line is Carson. We’re so glad to have him. He’s been on the show before – had a very interesting Ouija story a while back, and this one is equally fascinating. We’re so glad to have him. He’s a newly minted Plus member, so we appreciate his support and appreciate him coming back on the Campfire. Carson, welcome back. Thanks for joining us, and tell us this amazing story.
CARSON: Thanks for having me, Jim. This story started one night. I was having a very vivid, surreal dream. Not really surreal, but very intense – one of those dreams where you can’t really tell it from real life. I had this dream when I was about 20 years old. I’m in my forties now. I was in an airport, and I go to my gate and I go, “When are we boarding?” They go, “I’m sorry, sir, your flight’s cancelled.” I said, “I’ve really got to get where I’m going.” They said, “Sorry, it’s cancelled.”
In dream logic, I could go right to the next gate over and it was a similar flight, so I run over there and I go, “Hey, I need to get on the airplane.” They go, “Sorry, this flight’s cancelled as well.” I go to the next gate and they say, “Yeah, this flight just got cancelled also.” The anxiety is really building in me, and a real sense of dread. I’m running around the whole airport for what felt like hours going to gate after gate after gate. All of the flights were cancelled. Then finally someone who works there grabs me by the shoulders, looks me in the face, and says, “All the flights are cancelled. All the planes are grounded.” And I woke up. I thought, what a strange dream. Some kind of airport anxiety dream. I wasn’t traveling or anything, so there was no real reason for it.
I get up and I go to the bathroom and I start my breakfast. My family lived in a big ranch house back then, so the living room was very far from my bedroom. I finally make my way out there, and my dad is watching TV with an incredibly dour expression. He goes, “Hey, I didn’t want to bother you. I wanted you to have the rest of your morning unmarred by this. Terrorists just attacked the U.S.” It was 9/11.
JIM HAROLD: Wow. Wow. That’s all I can say, is wow. That’s just amazing to me. We’ve had other calls about 9/11. This is one of the most remarkable. I believe there’s this collective consciousness that you can tap into at times. People like Dean Radin have done work on this, and I believe that is a real thing. I think somehow, your psyche picked that out of the universe and that’s how it translated into your dream.
And boy, how prescient that was, because even at that point, nobody knew that all the planes would be grounded. I remember on 9/11, it was one of the few times I was not working for a media company. For about a year and a half, I got out of media and worked for a company that did computer servicing and things. My boss was headed to a meeting in the Carolinas or somewhere, and she was flying out of Reagan National in Washington. She calls me up and she says, “I don’t have their number. Can you call this office and tell them I’m going to be late? For some reason the plane’s delayed.” This was before we even knew about the Pentagon attacks. I said, “Well, actually I just heard that a plane hit the World Trade Center. I think this is connected.” She’s like, “No, no, that wouldn’t have anything to do with this.” I’m like, “Okay, I’ll call them and let them know.”
But yeah, man, how else do you explain it? How do you make sense of it?
CARSON: I think about this a lot. I meant to look up the name of the case – I’m sure you’ve heard of that town – I think it was in England, where the hillside collapsed and buried that school. Do you know that story?
JIM HAROLD: Yeah.
CARSON: All the children had drawn pictures of it weeks before, so much so that it’s confirmed psychic activity, which is a rare and exciting thing, even as tragic as it is. I think that when really bad things or really great things happen, they can reverberate through time, especially because I don’t think we really understand time. You know what I mean?
JIM HAROLD: I agree.
CARSON: So I think it might be some evidence of nonlinear time or something. Something spooky, that’s for sure.
JIM HAROLD: That is for sure indeed. Carson, thank you so much. It does make you think. And again, when people say, “What do you believe after doing all these stories?”, a lot of times it’s hard to say what I believe because there’s so many different things that go on. But I do say this: our existence and our reality is much stranger than we typically give it credit for in our everyday lives. And this is yet another confirmation of that. Carson, thank you so much for joining me on the show and sharing this great Campfire story.
CARSON: Thanks a lot, Jim.
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JIM HAROLD: Next up on the Campfire, we have a special guest, Natalie from Ohio. But actually, she’s my daughter Natalie, and she’s sitting right here in the studio. Hey, Natalie!
NATALIE: Hello… Jim. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: That was a question of some debate, whether you were going to call me Jim.
NATALIE: Well, I don’t have to. Hi, Dad. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: [laughs] We’ll let it pass this time. So, a lot of times on the show we talk about the theme of dreams, and you have a really wild dream story that happened to you a while back, correct?
NATALIE: Yes. I don’t dream too often. I don’t remember my dreams that much. But I did have one – I’m in college now, and I would say it was probably freshman or sophomore year of high school. I remember waking up and just feeling really weird. I don’t remember all the details of the dream; I just know that there was this guy in the dream, and I remember what he looked like. He had brunette hair, kind of curled a little bit, and he was wearing this red flannel shirt. I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I remember seeing him and feeling really uncomfortable.
The only word I can ever think to use to describe it is just weird. I just woke up and I felt strange, and I had never felt in that specific way before. But I remember his presence just made me feel uneasy. It was a negative feeling with it. Years went by and I blocked it out.
JIM HAROLD: And this is somebody that you never recall seeing previously.
NATALIE: No, I didn’t recognize his face at all, but I could see it, like now, I can picture it. And when I woke up I could picture his face perfectly, but I had no idea who this guy was. I just knew that I felt strange.
Then years pass. I was at my high school graduation, and I was sitting there with my friends and we were all waiting. It’s a long ceremony, of course. There’s the photographer there, who’s there to take pictures of the people after you walk across the stage and stuff, and he was walking around, and there was a whole team with him with other people taking pictures too. I said to my friends, “Do you guys know that guy? Do you see him? What’s up with that guy?” They’re like, “What? He’s just the photographer.” I’m like, “Yeah, but I feel uneasy today. I don’t know what it is.” They’re like, “Are you not happy?” I’m like, “No, I’m happy, but something’s wrong.”
[dun-dun-DUN! trumpet effect]
It was the same guy. That scared me. [laughs] But it was the same exact guy, down to the clothes, of the guy in my dream.
JIM HAROLD: That’s weird.
NATALIE: And I hadn’t thought about this dream for literally two or three years, since I had it. It had never crossed my mind again, and then I saw him and I put two and two together and I’m like, that is the same exact guy, and I have the same exact feeling. I didn’t interact with him. He took my picture a couple times, probably, but that was about it. And he wasn’t doing anything suspicious. He was just there to take pictures.
JIM HAROLD: He’s just doing his job.
NATALIE: Yeah. It was the same exact guy. Same face, same hair, same shirt.
JIM HAROLD: That is wild. So how do you interpret that? Do you think that you had a premonition of your graduation and the wires got crossed and it made it slightly sinister?
NATALIE: Maybe. I think that’s the only sort of explanation I have, like a premonition type thing. Because other than that, I have no idea where I would’ve seen this guy before. But it was a distinct face.
JIM HAROLD: You’re convinced this is exactly the same person.
NATALIE: Yeah.
JIM HAROLD: And you never saw him before.
NATALIE: No, I never saw him before, I never saw him after. But it was this feeling, too, that was coupled with it. It was just that weird feeling. Kind of creeped out, but I don’t think he was doing anything wrong. It just weirded me out. He was completely normal, just a normal guy. Just something about the presence that I felt in that room and in that dream was just weird.
JIM HAROLD: I don’t know how to explain that. But that’s the thing about doing Campfire. You know, Natalie, being very aware of the goings-on here at the Spooky Studio, that I come out of a recording session so many times saying, “You won’t believe this story. I have no idea what it means, but it’s wild.”
NATALIE: Exactly.
JIM HAROLD: To me it just hints towards the fact that reality and the way we experience reality is very strange, and it’s not as linear as people think, and there’s a lot more going on than we can understand because we can access these random things. It’s like in a computer, there’s random access memory. It can access memory from all over the storage of the system. It’s not necessarily linear.
I think sometimes our lives are kind of like that. When we have premonitions of things that are going to happen in the future, or we have flashes of the past, or we have this bond between family members across thousands of miles that happens, it’s almost like we have this random access memory that can access these datapoints at times that wouldn’t make sense if they’re truly linear. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. I’m not saying it very well. What do you think?
NATALIE: No, exactly, I agree. I think there has to be something, because how does stuff like that just happen? I have no explanation. There’s no logical explanation to that, other than – and I listen to the other stories, too, on the Campfire, and it’s similar things where there’s just no possible explanation other than something weird going on.
JIM HAROLD: One quick shoutout for my daughter before I go. She’s a very intelligent young woman. She also does a lot of editing for us. When you listen to the Campfire, many times you hear the stories that are edited together, and she does that. To date, what she’s been doing is editing the stories; then she’ll hand them off to me and I’ll compile it with the commercials and the voiceovers and everything. Soon, that part of it is going to go to an editor, but Natalie will continue to edit the stories themselves. So good job, Natalie.
NATALIE: Thank you. And good job to all the listeners and callers, because I have a lot of entertaining stuff to hear. Some of it scares me. I’ll be editing at night and –
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, you had one a few days ago…
NATALIE: Jack the Cat.
JIM HAROLD: Jack the Cat, yeah.
NATALIE: Freaked me out. I was editing alone and I was all alone and it was dark and nighttime, and I’m like, “Whoa.” I got chills.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, that’s the fun of the job. Keep ’em coming. Go to jimharold.com/campfire. Natalie, thank you so much for being a part of the Campfire, and as I always say… get good grades. No, as I always say, stay spooky. [laughs]
NATALIE: I’ll try. You stay spooky too.
JIM HAROLD: Dave is on the line from Utah, and he is a trucker. Let me just say, hats off to our truckers. For example, in my country, America, our country would not run without truckers. So hats off to Dave and all the truckers out there. 10-4, good buddy, to use a dated reference. [laughs] And thank you so much for doing what you do, because it’s so important and it’s a tough job. We appreciate it. Dave is going to tell us about a possible Bigfoot encounter. Dave, welcome to the show and tell us what happened.
DAVE: Thank you. I have a dedicated route. I go up to Montana from Salt Lake City three times a week. It’s mainly on the western side of Montana. There’s a town called Hamilton. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Montana that well, but if you found Butte, if you go straight across on the map, you might run into it, I think. I delivered there one night and finished up my route and was heading back home, and I went south on US-93, I believe it is. You come to a highway called Highway 43, state road, and then that shoots you across and you can get back over to I-15 and go south from there.
I got on that highway and I was driving along. It was three o’clock in the morning. The lights on my truck are pretty bright. They light up the whole area, 180-degree view. Then with the brights on, it’s even brighter. It’s just a two-lane highway, and on the left-hand side, about where the paint marks are on the edge of the road, there’s a figure there in the distance. There was a full moon, so I saw it off in the distance. I was like, what is somebody doing out in the middle of nowhere?
The whole time I was on this road, there was no traffic, no cars parked on the side of the road anywhere. I was like, what is somebody doing in the middle of the night, in the middle of the highway, at three o’clock in the morning in 32-degree weather? It just struck me as odd. As I got closer to it, I noticed the height of it was about to the top of my truck mirror. I’m 6’3”, and if I stand and raise my hand all the way up, I can reach the top of the mirror, so I’m figuring it’s about 8-½ feet tall.
It was just standing there, away from me, facing the other direction. As soon as I passed it, every hair on my body went straight up. I was like, “Is that what I think it was?” I went through it in my mind again and I was like, yeah, that was not a human being. That was something else. I figure I probably caught it off-guard, so it was probably standing still, trying to make like a tree. That’s what I figure. That’s my Bigfoot story.
JIM HAROLD: Wow. This is the thing that makes me believe in Bigfoot because sometimes I’m like, well, they’ve never found a body, they’ve never found this. But people like you, Dave, people working hard for a living just doing whatever they do – you’re not out there even looking for Bigfoot. You’re doing your job and you see something that’s 8 foot. By definition, that’s not a human.
DAVE: No. It was wide, too. I remember it being pretty wide and pretty tall.
JIM HAROLD: That is strange.
DAVE: It was spooky.
JIM HAROLD: If any other truckers have had any kind of cryptid sightings or UFO sightings, we’d love to hear from you, because you guys are kind of the eyes and ears because you’re out there on the open road. Male truckers, female truckers, all the truckers out there, we’d love to hear your stories of strange things you’ve encountered out on the highways and byways.
Dave, I know you had one other little quick story you wanted to get in today.
DAVE: Yeah. I know you like premonition stories.
JIM HAROLD: Yep.
DAVE: My buddy lived down the street from me in the last house I had, and he has horses. He wet out of town and he asked me to take care of them and all that. Every now and then I’d go riding with them. I got home for work and thought, “I’m going to go take a horse for a ride.” The thought came in my mind, “Probably not a good idea.” I thought about it for a minute. “Yeah, probably not. Nobody’s with me.” I get home and I decide to do it anyways, and the thought came back to me: “Not a good idea.”
I decided to do it anyways. I saddled up the horse and was riding along, and there were a bunch of trees off to my left. I remember all of a sudden – I think there was a deer back there that got spooked and started shaking the trees and the horse got spooked. I wasn’t ready for it, and it reared up on end and I fell straight backwards, landed on my back, knocked the wind out of me, and broke a rib too.
JIM HAROLD: Oh my.
DAVE: I got up and walked back and there was the horse. But if I would’ve listened, that wouldn’t have happened and I wouldn’t have been miserable for the next several weeks with a broken rib.
JIM HAROLD: It is funny how we get these little hunches and stuff. Sometimes we follow them and we say, “Boy, I’m glad I did that,” and sometimes we don’t and we’re like, “I knew better than that.” [laughs] It is interesting how that works, Dave. I think it’s a very, very real thing. Thank you so much. I know you have more stories. I hope you will call back in. Thank you for what you do, and be careful out there.
DAVE: I will call back when I have more time. Thank you so much.
JIM HAROLD: Jeremy is on the line from New Mexico, and all I have to say is he has a chilling, chilling story for us. Jeremy, welcome to the show and please tell us what happened.
JEREMY: I’ve been in New Mexico for almost six years. I’ve been pastoring a small church in rural New Mexico in the southwestern part of the state. When I first came here, my first week, I kept hearing doors shut. I just thought it was people coming in and out of the church, because in small churches, people have keys. Pretty much everyone. But one night, I heard a door open and no one was here, and I heard in a deep voice something say, “We don’t want you here.”
So I left the church, went home – and I live next door to the church. It creeped me out. But nothing really happened after that for a long time, not really anything much, except for last year I was having nightmares pretty much throughout the year. I kept having the same nightmare that something was choking me once or twice a week.
Last October, on a Wednesday evening/Thursday morning, around 2:30 in the morning, I had a cold, so I fell asleep on the couch watching TV. I woke up – I thought maybe it was a nightmare at first, but I woke up and I felt something choking me and I couldn’t breathe. I felt something on my chest, and I looked up, my eyes opened, and all I could see was basically a black figure with long arms. It said, “We told you we don’t want you here. Now it’s time for us to kill you.”
JIM HAROLD: Oh my goodness.
JEREMY: In what felt like maybe two hours – literally it felt like forever; it was probably 10 seconds – I finally could speak, and I said, “Well, you can go kill me but you can’t kill Jesus.” As soon as I said that, it said, “No, not Jesus.” It creeped me out, but I thought maybe it was a nightmare. I didn’t know what to make of it – until the next morning on the way to school. My wife and I also had been teaching at a private school. She said, “Why do you have scratch marks on your neck, and why was there blood on your t-shirt?” I said, “What are you talking about?”
Then I thought maybe – we had a 120-pound American bulldog, a sweet dog, but a dog that big, if she’s playing rough with you, she’ll scratch you. But it wasn’t those types of scratch marks. It was almost like scratch marks from some type of creature with long nails, like you see sometimes in movies or documentaries about creatures. I don’t know how to explain it.
I told her what happened, and then she says, “I saw the same thing that night in the house.” But what was strange is the summer before, we took our teenagers to New York City to work with refugees and teach English and help them, and we had one teenager who’s a senior this year that wouldn’t clean the – they cleaned the church to help raise money for it. He wouldn’t clean the sanctuary because pew Bibles were being thrown at him and no one else was in there. That was the night that no other teenagers were here except him, and it was me and my wife.
The funny thing is since then, nothing really horrifying has happened, but I’ll be here at church and I’ll make lunch and I’ll go use the restroom, and my drink I poured out will be moved or drunk or poured out or something. Things will be moved around. We kept our nursery locked because we don’t have kids that young, and things that are in there will be moved out and then they’ll be moved back in. I know people say people can get in and out, but there’s only three of us that have keys, and I’m the only one here during the week that has a key to it, and it’s locked.
So strange things still happen, but nothing really that bothers me. I’ve talked to other pastors in New Mexico and they’ve had similar experiences. I really thought it was a nightmare at first, but it was real when I saw the blood on my shirt. I wish I took a picture of the blood and my scratches on my neck, but I didn’t think of it. It was pretty horrifying.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, I think it would be very horrifying to hear that kind of guttural voice.
JEREMY: And that’s the best I could do. There’s no other way I can do it, but it was a deep voice and it was scary.
JIM HAROLD: That would be scary. Jeremy, thank you for sharing and please keep us updated if anything else happens. I do believe there are good spirits out there, and I do believe that there are some that do not wish us well indeed. Thank you for being a part of the Campfire today.
JEREMY: Thank you. Thank you very much. Have a good day, sir.
JIM HAROLD: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp therapy online. You know, when my uncle, who I was extremely close to, and my mom died within two weeks of each other unexpectedly, I kind of wished that life had a user manual. But it doesn’t. Sometimes you need some help. And a great place to go for that help is BetterHelp online therapy. It’s basically the next best thing to a user manual.
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JIM HAROLD: Jesse is on the line with us on the Campfire, and he’s going to talk to us about something that’s always fascinated me: astral projection and lucid dreaming. Had a very meaningful experience he’s going to tell us about. He’s calling in from Southern California today. Jesse, welcome to the show and tell us what happened.
JESSE: Hey Jim, thanks for having me. Yeah, it’s about astral projection. About six, seven years ago, I got into this online community of people who practice astral projection. I got so into it that I eventually started practicing myself. Now, to me at least, astral projection is one of the most difficult things to accomplish. It’s not easy by any means. Takes a lot of focus. It’s very hard to do overall. So I wasn’t always very successful, but there were two occasions where I was able to pop out of my body.
The first instance was when I worked at this warehouse. Like I said, this was about six or seven years ago, and I worked at this warehouse. This might’ve been noon, middle of the day, and I decided I wanted to practice. Went outside, clocked out for lunch. They used to give us a one-hour lunch back then at that job, so a fairly long time. We’d have a lot of time after we ate. So I figured this time, “Hey, I’m going to practice in my car.” I went around and parked in the parking lot, which was right in the back by the offloading ramps where the semitrucks would come and get offloaded. Parked there and I practiced.
Essentially, it’s your mind trying to convince your body that it’s asleep. That’s essentially the first step. You try to lie as still as possible without moving and basically focus on nothing. Think of nothingness. I know that sounds impossible, and that’s one of the hardest steps. You focus on nothingness. If you have an itch or you’re uncomfortable, you don’t move. You just try to stay as still as possible.
About 15-20 minutes after that, you get to the stage which is sleep paralysis, where your mind has convinced your body that it’s asleep now. Now, in most instances people are going to panic. People panic, they start yelling, they want to get out. They freak out. This is where people fail at astral projection. So you maintain your self-calm. The way I was taught is what they call the rollover method. You would lift your shoulder, not physically, but more so in your astral body. Try to lift your left shoulder and pop out of your body.
I didn’t realize until that moment that you literally feel a pop. Like a popping sensation. And in that moment, I felt the pop, and now I was floating in the backseat of my car. I look out the windows and I can see everything around me. I can see my physical body lying in the front seat of the car, and I feel like I’m stuck in the car. I check the back window and I just float through the back window, out of the car, and now I’m in the back of the parking lot and I can see a lot of stuff going on.
I can see a truck driver getting there, and I remember the color of the semi was a yellow truck. It was a bald driver. I remember the physical characteristics of the driver, the truck, him getting off at the warehouse, walking in and getting offloaded. I jump up to what is the ceiling of the warehouse, but as I jump up, there’s another warehouse – not physically, but there’s another warehouse directly on top of that warehouse that you cannot see in the physical world. It looked very torn down, very old, maybe like 1800s type of thing. There was water dropping, or what I assumed was water. Just very dark and scary-looking warehouse.
Now, in the astral body, I’m not really walking. I’m more so gliding. There’s a lot of freedom in movement. You can move in any way you’d like. In this situation I was gliding through this warehouse, and I could see what I thought were shadow beings just roaming around this warehouse. It was a massive, massive building, and they’re just moving back and forth. They’re not really paying attention to me; they’re doing their own thing, and I’m doing the same. I’m just exploring, going through what I thought was a warehouse.
Like I said, very dark, very eerie, but nothing very scary happened. It was more so exploration and just checking out what was what, what’s going on. Eventually I ended up jumping back down, popping back into my body, and when I awoke, the first thing that came to my mind, I said, “This was a dream. There’s no way this really happened to me.” I get out, clock in, and I start talking to one of the guys in the warehouse. I brought up the fact of this delivery. I said, “Hey, did this truck driver come with this yellow truck, and did this material get offloaded?”
They confirmed everything, and that’s when I realized this wasn’t just a dream. This really happened. Through my astral body, I could see all, like I said, the physical characteristics of the truck and the driver and the material that was being offloaded. And this was while I was supposed to be asleep.
JIM HAROLD: Huh. Wow.
JESSE: So that’s how I knew it was actually real astral projection, because someone else confirmed all those things afterwards.
JIM HAROLD: You said that it’s not easy to do. Why do you think you were successful?
JESSE: I was watching videos every day, different people. I was listening on a bunch of different places. I was really focused at the time, I guess I would say. I don’t want to say I practice now, but once in a while I’ll give it a go, I’ll try it out, and for some reason or another I just cannot get into the same mindset as I was. I just found it way easier six or seven years ago to do it. In total, I was only successful twice.
JIM HAROLD: That’s something else. A lot of people would think maybe you did actually fall asleep and you were dreaming all of that, but you say absolutely not because of that affirmation.
JESSE: Right. I assume the first time anybody does it, the first time they wake up, they write it off as a dream. It’s got to be something logical. But when you get confirmation from someone else that what you saw was actually real, it changes everything.
JIM HAROLD: Sure.
JESSE: There was a second time, if you don’t mind. I’ll get into it real quick.
JIM HAROLD: Go ahead.
JESSE: There was a second time, and this time it happened at my parents’ house. I was practicing as well. This was a nighttime astral projection. Fairly quick, but it was one of those really fun – this was the second time, so I had a lot more fun with it. This was quicker. Just popped out of my body and it was a rainy night, and I remember I was taking these huge leaps. I mean 150-foot leaps as I’m running through the city where I’m from.
Eventually I stop at this big Target parking lot. This Target has a huge parking lot, and I remember literally leaping like a kid on a trampoline through this parking lot, taking these really huge steps and laughing and being happy about all the freedom I had in this astral realm. That was one of the more funner times.
JIM HAROLD: It really does seem like a neat thing to be able to do, if you can master it, to have that freedom and not have your body encumbered, and to be able to make 150-feet leaps. Something like that sounds like a lot of fun. So you just decided to set it aside for now? Life’s happened and it’s not a priority for you now?
JESSE: Honestly, like I said, it takes a lot of focus. You have to really block out outside noises, and to be honest with you, Jim, in those six to seven years, I’ve had two kids. So that kind of answers it. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: There you go. Well, Jesse, very cool indeed. Very interesting subject. And if other people have had these experiences, we’d love to hear them. Jesse, thank you for being a part of the Campfire today.
JESSE: Thank you for having me, Jim.
JIM HAROLD: Erika is on the Spooky Studio line, and we’re so glad she is because I don’t know if we’ve – well, we’ve had a couple calls I know of this subject over the years, but this is one of my favorite subjects, actually. And if you’ve got a story, we’d love for you to sign up at jimharold.com/campfire. It is about the topic of reincarnation.
As I was telling Erika, this is something that I was interested in since I was a little kid. I remember there was a TV movie, The Lives of Peter Proud or something like that. I’ll look it up during the call. I saw that when I was a real little kid and I’m like, “This is fascinating!” I’ve always been fascinated by reincarnation since then. And Erika’s going to tell us her experience, which ties into that theme. Erika, thanks for joining us all the way from Vermont. I know you’re a new listener, so welcome as a listener and a caller, and please tell us what happened.
ERIKA: Thanks so much. I’ll give you a little bit of context. I used to have a YouTube channel. I’m a tarot card reader, and I also delved into topics related to pagan spirituality, and reincarnation is a big part of my personal spiritual belief system. My friend who also had a YouTube channel, she and I agreed we would do this past life regression that we found on YouTube and that we would report back and do a video on our experiences.
We did that; unfortunately, the video is no longer around. I don’t do YouTube anymore. However, the story was so great, I felt like it needed to be out here, so I wanted to share it with you.
JIM HAROLD: Great.
ERIKA: Basically, I was running out of time to film this video. I had to do the meditation. So I ended up doing this with a two-year-old in bed with me, so I was distracted. I was concerned I wouldn’t get much out of the experience, but boy was I wrong. [laughs]
Basically, this meditation starts out like your classic hypnosis experience where you’re brought down to a deep altered state of consciousness. You walk down this hill to this temple that is essentially the Akashic records. You enter this hallway, and you’re told that the doors you see in this meditation may either just be numbered and all look the same, or they may look different. In my case, they looked different. You’re told to set the intention to select the door that will access a lifetime that will give you a spiritual lesson you need at the time in your life. This was in 2018.
I select this door that is green – you know those doorknobs that are cut glass that look almost like a crystal, like they have many facets on them? So I select this door and I turn the doorknob and I step through, and I find myself in this stone archway, almost like gothic style archway, and I’m standing on cobblestones. I’m looking out onto this cobblestone street. It was a very narrow street with houses on the other side, a tree outside of the archway.
I’m standing there, and they have you very slowly experience the environment you’re in. You stand there for a moment and you take that in, and then they ask you questions. They ask you, “Where are you?” I said, “London.” They said, “What year is it?” I think I said 1880. I have my notes right here. 1889. They said, “How old are you?” I said, “23.” They said, “What’s your name?” I said, “Beatrice,” without hesitation. All this is just – because you’re in that deep state.
They have you step out of your body and turn and look at the person that you are, and it was this small-statured, kind of mousy, if you will, looking woman. She’s wearing this relatively fancy blue silk gown that has – I have some history background, so it was appropriate to the era – a high-collared lace, the bustle in the back. I’m wearing gloves, and I recognize I have a ring on under the gloves, because they ask you, “What jewelry are you wearing?” I have a ring on, I’m wearing a gold cross.
So I see everything. I won’t go into all the detail because we don’t have a ton of time. Then they ask you to look at your surroundings, so I step out of the archway and I walk down the side of this building, and there’s another archway and there’s a sign that says “St. Matthew’s Church.” I intuitively know that this is my wedding day. This is a significant day in the lifetime of this person.
Then you go forward in the lifetime. They have you jump forward to other important points. I won’t go into all the detail because most of it was personal to my own spiritual journey; however, I recognized that the husband – I thought the husband’s name was James, last initial M. James M. So I go through the life. She had, I’ll just say, a kind of lonely, depressing, unremarkable life and she died of old age, so it wasn’t anything dramatic.
I finish this meditation and I think, “Huh, this is interesting because this is a relatively recent lifetime.” It’s not like it was a Stone Age event where you couldn’t find information. I grab my computer and I google the doorknob. The first thing that comes to mind is this doorknob. And it says these doorknobs were popular during the 1920s, that time period. Then I google a little bit more and I find out they actually came into fashion in the 1880s and ’90s in upper middle class homes, and I was like, that’s exactly this life that I had. This person was I would say probably upper middle class. I’m like, interesting.
Then I google – I have a picture of it here – I googled “blue 1880s wedding dress,” and this image pops up that looks identical to the dress I was wearing. I’m like, okay, this is getting creepy. [laughs] Because that was right on the money. So I got even braver. I thought, I know I was in London and I know the name of the church. How many churches could there be in London with that name? So I google it, and there’s a few churches. I thought there were going to be a lot more than one. There were only two, and one of them was built later. It was built at the turn of the 20th century. This church was built I think in the 1860s or something.
So I look at an image of the church, and lo and behold – and I have printed this out and everything, I kept it – not only do I see the archways, but I did the Google Earth imaging and I see that there’s still cobblestone street behind the church. So I assume there was more also in front of the church. So basically I found the church. It’s called St. Matthew’s of Bayswater, and it’s in – I can’t remember the part of London. Westminster somewhere. So I found the church and I’m like, oh my God, this actually exists.
Having some history background, I knew I could find records, and because I felt this person got married, I thought, I wonder if I could find a record of this marriage. So I actually called the church up. I felt like I was in a movie or something. – Yeah, it was in Westminster. I’m just looking at the records. They say, “All the information is on Ancestry.com now.” I’m like, “Oh, of course it is.” So I do the free trial and I’m going through these records, and I find I think four people with the name Beatrice, because you can search the records by name.
Only one of those people was married – because I’m searching wedding records at the end of the 19th century; the rest of them were later in the 20th century. I click on that link, and the woman is 23 years old and she was married in 1886, so I was three years off. And her father’s name was John Murray, so James M. was what I thought I got for the spouse, but it was actually the father. I basically found this woman. Of all these records, all the other women with the name Beatrice were married, like I said, much later. They were a different age. But I literally got the age 23, and I got the correct name, the correct last initial, and almost the correct year.
So I found this person, and to me that was a huge turning point in my belief system around reincarnation because I had actual – in my experience. I mean, nobody else did the meditation with me. But I experienced this myself, and then I found this person. So I was able to find the person who I was in a past life. I didn’t go any further; I didn’t try to find more about this person’s life because for me, that was validation enough. And I have done the same meditation a few times and had other experiences, but none of them were documentable, I guess is the word, like this lifetime.
But it was amazing because you reach into the web of time and you pull one string; what are the odds you’re actually going to find the correct name, the correct age, almost the correct year, give or take three years. That’s pretty impressive. So yeah, that’s my story. It was a really amazing experience.
JIM HAROLD: Well, I’ve got to say, reincarnation is a very interesting concept. To have somebody touched by it in this way is truly fascinating.
An interesting example is we had somebody who called in one time and said that their son was a little boy – this was over in England – and that there was a biplane flying over the neighborhood. There was some kind of airshow, and a biplane like the old-school World War I Red Baron airplanes. The little boy says, “That sounds like the plane that killed me,” and he goes on to say, “You know when I had a different mom and my name was (whatever his name was) and we were sitting and listening to the radio, and all of a sudden there was an explosion, and there was blood all around?” This little kid, like four or five years old.
Of course, as he grew older he didn’t remember it at all. That was the one I was thinking about earlier when I mentioned it. That movie, by the way, was The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, so I was close
ERIKA: I’ve seen that.
JIM HAROLD: But ig uess the point is, to me, it’s just fascinating, and fascinating when someone’s actually experienced it. Erika, thank you so much for sharing your story today.
ERIKA: My pleasure. Thank you for having me, and I look forward to continuing to listen and hear a lot more cool stories like this – and the ghost stories. I have a couple of those. Maybe I’ll call in another time and share.
JIM HAROLD: Sounds great. Thanks so much.
Jamie is on the line from Connecticut, and he’s one of these folks who grew up in a haunted house. He has a number of little stories about strange things that happened, and we’re the lucky ones because he’s going to share them with us now. Jamie, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us, and tell us what happened.
JAMIE: Thank you for having me. Like you said, it’s a bunch of short stories that are somewhat connected. I thought they were all isolated stories, but I learned later they’re pretty much the same thing.
I grew up in an old house in central Connecticut. It was an old farm town. It’s the exact center of Connecticut. I found out that my house, the first house on our street, used to be a really old farm. This story goes back to when I was like six. It was the middle of the night. I stumbled into my mom’s room. I was six, a toddler, and I said, “Mom, he’s in my room again.” She’s like, “What are you talking about?” I said, “The man. The man’s in my room again.” She’s obviously freaking out and she’s like, “What man are you talking about?”
Then I got really specific for some reason. I don’t know why a six-year-old would be this specific. I said, “The 1 through 5 Minute Man. The man that comes into my room for 1 through 5 minutes every night.”
JIM HAROLD: Wow.
JAMIE: It’s oddly specific. I don’t really understand.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, it is.
JAMIE: But then I found out a few months later that that happened multiple times. I came to her room multiple times telling her some guy was in my room, which is pretty creepy.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, no question.
JAMIE: Then all the other stories are later on in my life. When I was about 16, I was sleeping in my room and I woke up in the middle of the night, turned to my left, and I saw this old man just standing there watching me. I freaked out and I went to grab my phone. I turned the flashlight on and the second I lifted it up, the guy was gone. He had vanished. It was very weird.
JIM HAROLD: This was quite a while ago, but do you remember what he was dressed in?
JAMIE: He was just a older guy, and I distinctly remember overalls. Like I said, it was an old farm town, so I’m guessing some kind of farmer. That’s what me and my wife started calling him after that.
The other stories – this is a long story, but for some reason my door didn’t have a doorknob. It was just an empty hole where you could see into the hallway, which is very weird. But like I said, it was an old house, so you could hear creaks every time someone took a step in the hall. I would see shadows walk past the hole in the door with no sound. If it was someone walking past, you’d be able to hear them. And we did not hear anything. It was just silence and a shadow walking back and forth.
Here’s another one. My wife and I met someone in an internship we did together and we became really close friends. I didn’t know this, but my wife did – she can kind of see spirits, I guess. She doesn’t really like talking about it, but she can see them and feel what they’re feeling. So she decided to come up for a Halloween weekend one year, and she stayed at my house. My wife didn’t tell her anything about the house. Nothing about anything we experienced, any kind fog hosts.
The second she walked in the house, she was like, “Huh, what happened here?” I’m like, “What are you talking about? That’s a little ominous.” She’s like, “There’s this man walking back and forth in the hall.”
JIM HAROLD: That’s strange.
JAMIE: It’s definitely weird. She could tell he was a farmer. I don’t know how she could tell, but she knew. It was definitely weird. I think it was one of those memories or something, where it just does the same thing over and over and over again. I think it was just reliving that moment of walking back and forth. It only stayed on the first level. It never went upstairs. And the first level was the only part of the house before they added on to it.
JIM HAROLD: That’s pretty wild. If you think about it – and the fact that was the oldest house, that’s interesting to me.
JAMIE: Definitely creepy.
JIM HAROLD: Do you think these were residual hauntings, like replays? Or do you feel like they were more sentient? What did you think?
JAMIE: Residual. That was the word I was looking for, not memory. It was definitely something like that.
JIM HAROLD: I can tell you it’s really interesting. It’s very, very interesting. I love the history of the old houses and so forth. Is this one of those things you look back like it was kind of scary at the time, but you’re glad you’ve got the memory? Or would you rather that not have happened?
JAMIE: I’m kind of glad it happened. It started my lifelong passion for spooky stuff, which is kind of cool.
JIM HAROLD: Interesting indeed. Thank you so much, Jamie. Thank you so much for being a part of the Campfire. We appreciate it, and stay spooky.
JAMIE: I will. Thanks. Have a good one.
JIM HAROLD: You are cordially invited to our annual Halloween Party. It will be 8 p.m. Eastern to 11 p.m. Eastern, and again, that is this Saturday, October 29th. I’m on Eastern Time, so you can adjust for your particular area.
What do we do on the virtual livestream? We do a lot of things. First of all, I dress up in costume, as does Dar, as does Cassandra. I believe Natalie will be joining us this year as well as Maddy, so the whole gang will be here. We will have special guests; some of them have remained secret. They will be secret surprises at the time of this recording, but stay tuned for that because we’re going to have some great guests here. Some of your favorite podcasters, authors. It’s going to be a lot of fun.
Plus, trivia and giveaways. You can get free stuff, possibly. You may win a t-shirt. You may win a book. Who knows what you could win? But you can’t win anything unless you are there.
Where can you tune in? It will be on my YouTube channel. That’s really the best place to tune in. That’s at youtube.com/jimharold. That’s youtube.com/jimharold. Also, it will be on my Jim Harold page on Facebook, and we will endeavor to also get it on the Virtual Campfire Group as well. Those three places. But let me tell you, the best place to do it is in YouTube because we can see those comments, we can respond to those comments. So really that is the best place. That’s youtube.com/jimharold.
And if you are not subscribed to my YouTube channel, I highly recommend you do that because we are doing more Campfire Story Times and we’re doing a lot of experimentation and trying to come out with a video a week as best we can. That is at youtube.com/jimharold. And make sure to like the videos and hit the notification bell so you’re notified immediately when we have a new video out – including this big Virtual Halloween Party coming up on this Saturday, October 29th, between 8 p.m. Eastern and 11 p.m. Eastern.
Now, if you are hearing this after that, I am so sorry. But you can go back and look at the replay. But I’ve got to say, it’s so much more fun live. [laughs] I’ve been Pennywise on the stream. I’ve been the Joker on the stream. I’ve been David S. Pumpkins on the stream. And I’m going to dress up with a good one this year. But I’m not telling. You’re going to have to tune in to our Virtual Halloween Party this Saturday, October 29th, 8 p.m. Eastern to 11 p.m. Eastern on YouTube, on my YouTube channel (youtube.com/jimharold) and other outlets. Thanks so much!
Follow Jim on Twitter and Instagram @TheJimHarold and join our virtual Campfire Facebook group at VirtualCampfireGroup.com. Now, back to the Campfire.
JIM HAROLD: Next up on the Campfire is a return caller. You’ll remember Toni was on the line a while back – on the Spooky Studio line, we’re calling it these days – and she had a very personal story about her sister. And now she’s going to tell us one about her dad. Toni, welcome back from Illinois. We’re so glad to speak with you again, and please tell us this story about your father.
TONI: Thanks for having me back. My father, my hero, my best friend, we were raised in New Mexico, if anyone remembers. My dad is from a small town called Gallup.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, “Route 66,” the song. Gallup, New Mexico.
TONI: Exactly.
JIM HAROLD: There we go.
TONI: My dad was an older gentleman when he had me – surprise! [laughs] And wound up being my mentor, my best friend, and everything. As the years progressed, as he aged and everything else, my father’s mental capacity went into dementia. He started to decline, and unfortunately, I lost him. That man had to leave with a bang. He left on Father’s Day in 2015.
I was a wreck. It was the day of, and I’m walking down the street in downtown Chicago, busy area. I have lived in this city – at this time now, I’ve been here 25 years. I had always lived downtown. I have never seen any crazy wildlife that I’m about to mention, but on this day, I’m walking down a street called Clark Street going towards an avenue called North Avenue, which is in an area called Gold Coast. It’s very busy. I mean, people are walking back and forth. I’m on the phone with my mom and I’m crying and I’m saying, “I don’t know how I’m going to do this without Dad. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I didn’t get to say goodbye.” Typical things that every child says about losing a parent.
And out of nowhere, this red cardinal – I know where the cardinals stay and what have you. I’ve never seen one downtown. Literally flew down, landed right next to me, and was just hopping about 12 inches ahead of me. I’m looking at this bird and I’m like, are you kidding me? I’m telling my mom, “Mom, there’s a red cardinal.” She’s like, “Are you kidding me?” I’m like, “Mom, it’s Dad.”
All of a sudden I look and the bird stops and I stop and I go, “Dad, is that you? If it’s you, hop back two times.” It hopped back two times. I go, “Whoa.” Then I go, “Dad? Are you okay?” And the bird jumped back two times. I was like, okay. “Dad, can you go up on the fence if this is really you?” It went up right on this little fence. I was like, “Dad, I’m so sorry.” I had a full-blown conversation on the phone with my mom, and she’s like, “Tell your father I said hello.” I’m like, “He knows.”
I go, “Dad, I love you,” and everything I missed saying, everything I wanted to say, I got to say it right there. I’m sure people were walking by thinking I was crazy. But the bird never ran, it never flew off, it didn’t do anything. As I looked, I go, “Oh my God, Dad, if this is you” – and I put my arm out – the bird came and landed on my hand, and I said, “I love you, Dad.” It just looked at me a little bit and took off. And I lost it.
It was possibly one of the most beautiful things that could’ve ever happened to me. I got to say goodbye.
JIM HAROLD: Wow. And those signs are real. We’ve had many, many reports, many, many stories of people having signs. They’re different for everybody, but they’re just as significant and just as real.
TONI: Yeah. I’m very lucky.
JIM HAROLD: Indeed.
TONI: Sorry. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: No, it’s real, and that just shows how much you love your dad. And obviously, he loves you too, to come and give you that kind of a sign. Toni, thank you so much for sharing your very kind story here on the Campfire tonight.
TONI: Thank you for having me again.
JIM HAROLD: Thanks so much for tuning in to this edition of the Campfire. I hope that it added to the spooky season. I hope that you will certainly join us on the livestream this coming Saturday at 8 p.m. Eastern at youtube.com/jimharold. We’ll be doing some trivia giveaways and all the stuff we talked about before. So I hope that you will do that.
Also, we have a spooky shoutout and a happy birthday to Becky. A.D. and O.V. wrote and said, “We would like to ask if, on Thursday the 27th of October, you could give a shoutout to our mother on the Campfire podcast, please.” Most glad to do it, A.D. and O.V. Her name is Becky, and A.D. and O.V. say, “She loves Jim’s podcasts. She listens to your Campfire podcast and has been listening to your podcasts since around 2014. Her birthday is on November 1st, but this is the closest podcast to her birthday. We wanted to hear this from you because we think it would really mean a lot to her.”
So Becky, thank you for your loyal listenership for all these years. Happy Halloween, happy birthday, and stay spooky.
And that goes for all of you out there as well. I hope you stay safe, have a great time on Halloween, hope you can join us for that special broadcast Saturday night, and stay spooky. We’ll talk to you next time.
And guess what? Next week, when everybody’s forgotten about the spooky stuff, you know who’ll be here? You know who’ll be sharing spooky stories? That’s right, your buddy Jim. Talk to you next time. 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.