The Boy Who Saw Hatman – Campfire 600

A young boy sees hatman, a woman sees dead people, living in a haunted house, a knowing that a loved one has tragically passed and much more on this edition of Campfire!

JIM HAROLD LIVE CAMPFIRE TOUR!!!!

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TRANSCRIPT

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

JIM HAROLD: Welcome to the Campfire. I am Jim Harold and so excited to be with you today. This is the correct place to be if you want to hear spooky stories from real people.

But first, I have a big announcement. I’ve mentioned this on social media the last couple of days, and it is official: I am going on tour! We’re going to start out with four cities. We hope it’s very successful and we can continue it on, but we are going to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on June 21st, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on June 22nd, New York, New York, on June 24th, and Boston, Massachusetts, on June 25th.

You may ask, “Jim, how can I get tickets?” Well, if you are listening to this before Friday, April 14th at 10 a.m. Eastern, which is the general on-sale date for everybody, if you’re a Plus Club member, you can get early presale access by going over to jimharold.com/tour, clicking on the presale buttons, and then basically you put in a password, which you can hear on my Plus Club shows. I’ve added little mini episodes with that special password, and you can go in and get early access before everybody. Now, if you’re not a Plus Club member, you could always join, or you can wait until Friday 10 a.m. Eastern. Then the tickets will go on sale for everybody.

So that is Friday, April 14th at 10 a.m. Eastern the tickets will go on sale for everybody. I hope you can join us. We are making this a multimedia experience. We’re going to bring in audience stories, some of my favorite stories, stories you’ve never heard before, some fun interactive stuff, Q&A. We really wanted to make it a whole experience, just not a podcast recording. I’m so excited to get out and do the Campfire show with you, and I hope that you’ll join us.

So get your tickets at jimharold.com/tour. Again, those go on general sale for everyone Friday, April 14th at 10 a.m. Eastern. There’s also some VIP Meet & Greet opportunities if you want to take advantage of those when you select your purchase. You can select that level if you want to meet me in person and have a photo opportunity. That’ll be a lot of fun, too. That’s also an option. So I hope that you’ll join us on the 2023 Tour, four cities – at least to start out. That is Jim Harold Live: Stories From Around the Campfire, and you get your tickets Friday, April 14th at 10 a.m. Eastern at jimharold.com/tour.

Now that we’ve taken care of that piece of business (and please do join us), let’s take care of this important piece of business: these great Campfire stories.

Well, we are so glad that Samantha is on the line from upstate New York. Her aunt Lorraine told her about the show, so thank you, Lorraine, and stay spooky. Samantha, I know you have a story about your mom. Thank you for joining us, and please share your story.

SAMANTHA: Thank you, Jim, so much. Just to start off, I wanted to let everyone know that my mom passed of cancer in 2010.

JIM HAROLD: I’m sorry.

SAMANTHA: Thank you. My husband and I did not start having children until 2012, so needless to say, my children have never met my mom, at least in our physical world here. [laughs] This takes place about 2015. My daughter was a little over a year old. She woke up in the wee hours of the morning crying. She wasn’t an overly fussy baby, colicky, no issues, so this was very uncommon for her to do this. I went in to settle her, changed her diaper. Didn’t help. Gave her a bottle, still crying. She wasn’t sick, didn’t appear to be feverish, no cold, runny nose, nothing like that. I tried rocking, I tried patting her butt, stroking her face and rubbing her head. Nothing I was doing seemed to be working. I tried reading her a book.

I had been in her room for about 45 minutes, trying all these different things to settle her. As you can imagine, it’s nearing three in the morning now and I’m getting pretty exhausted and a little frustrated myself. So I put my daughter back in her crib and I said, “You’re just going to have to cry it out. I’m getting tired and frustrated and I don’t know what else I can do to help you.” I went to leave her room, and as I was closing her door, I still had my hand on the doorknob and I looked up and I said, “Mom, help.”

Jim, there must’ve been quite the level of desperation in my voice, because two seconds later, my daughter says, “It’s Grandma, yay!”

JIM HAROLD: Whoa.

SAMANTHA: Yeah. She did a little bit of clapping, baby babble like she was talking to my mom, and then she was out the rest of the night. So yeah. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: Wow, that is awesome. Say what she said again? What did she say again?

SAMANTHA: I said, “Mom, help,” and she said, “It’s Grandma.” The other thing is children that young don’t get family associations like that. I said “Mom.” She wouldn’t know, especially never having met her in the first place.

JIM HAROLD: Right. That is the coolest story. Now, has that continued? Was that the one and only time?

SAMANTHA: Oh, no, my mom is very strong when either she needs to be or she feels she should be in our lives or intervening in some way. My husband actually called me at work one day, midday, morning nap for my daughter. He says, “Your daughter’s freaking me out.” I chuckled and said, “Why?” He said he was getting her up from her nap and she looked over to an “empty” corner of the room and said, “Hi, Grandma.” He said, “What?” That got her attention, so she looked back at him but didn’t say anything to my husband, and then looked back to this, again, “empty” corner and said, “Hi, Grandma.”

JIM HAROLD: That is so awesome. I guess that’s got to provide quite a bit of comfort for you.

SAMANTHA: Oh, absolutely. We do have some random paranormal experiences here and there, and my children have both stressed that when they know it’s family or know it’s Grandma, they’re not scared at all. It’s wonderful.

JIM HAROLD: It sounds like it certainly is. Well, Samantha, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for taking time. Appreciate you being a part of the Campfire today.

SAMANTHA: Thank you so much, Jim. Bye-bye.

JIM HAROLD: Next is Robin from Illinois, and we’re so glad to have her on the show because when I read the synopsis of this story, I went, “Oh my, oh my, oh my.” [laughs] Robin’s son was visited by none other than the Hat Man, and she’s going to tell us all about it. Robin, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us. Tell us what happened with your son and the Hat Man.

ROBIN: It actually started when he was very little, like two or three, whenever things are very new and little, and he called him “the cowboy.” He loved everything about cowboys, and we thought that it was an imaginary friend, and it went on for a while. He would pretend he leaned against the wall and would tip his hat, and he’d say, “I’m a cowboy,” and it was cute. I talked to the pediatrician about it and she said it’s normal. Imaginary friend. He’s an only child.

It went on for a while, and we approached age four and five and he’s still talking about it, but the name changed to “the man in the hat.” The tone was different. I could tell that he didn’t like it anymore. He always talked about him leaning against the wall staring at him. I said, “You control him. Make him go away. You don’t want to play,” because he’s still very small. He kind of acted like I didn’t understand, but he was four or five, and I said, “You control this.” He was very active in sports, so it wasn’t an everyday occurrence, but it was consistent enough that it stayed in the back of my mind.

As we approached age six to seven, he started calling him “the Hat Man.” I really knew there were things that were going on that scared Riley. He did not want to be in the basement. It was always in the basement where this was. He would tell me how he leaned against the wall and stared at him. I never saw it. I still have never seen it. My son is 22 years old now, so it went on a long time.

When it became a bigger issue was when friends would spend the night and they didn’t want to stay in the basement either, but that was when they were like eight years old. As they got a little bit older, they would stay down there – it’s funner to have sleepovers in the basement. Riley wouldn’t talk to a lot of people about it, but his very best friend did know about it. One particular night, they were spending the night. We have a sectional, like an “L” in our basement. He’d sleep on one end and my son on the other end.

About two o’clock in the morning – and I think they were probably sixth grade at this time, maybe seventh grade – his friend came upstairs in a panic, woke me up, wanted me to take him home. I kept asking, “What’s wrong?” and he wouldn’t say. He was just, “Please take me home.” So I get ready to take him home. We’re in the car and I was like, “Just please tell me what happened. Did you have a fight?” He said there was a very tall man in the corner with a hat, squatted down at one point, and was breathing my son’s breath. He said, “That’s the only way I can describe it.” He was right to his mouth, breathing his breath. It scared him so bad that he wanted to go home.

JIM HAROLD: Whoa.

ROBIN: So I took him home, and the next day, we as a family – because we only have one child – sat and talked about it. We were really shaken up because I’m like, “What is this thing?” I get on the internet and google it, and it’s like inundated. The Hat Man is very big. You can find anything you want to read about him on the internet. And it’s always children.

So it continued. At one point my son was probably in eighth grade and I heard him yelling, “Leave me alone! You’re not welcome here!” Just all sorts of irate. I asked him, “Did you see it again?” He said, “No, but sometimes I can feel it, and I just want it to leave me alone.” I never saw the thing. Not one time. But I can tell you I felt it. It created an atmosphere that made you feel sick. That’s the only way I can describe it. It was thick. The atmosphere felt thick in our house when he would complain of this thing.

And even talking about it now makes me nervous. I’m probably nervous anyway, but I feel like it’s a beacon, and I just am so afraid that it would maybe come back.

JIM HAROLD: What does your son say about it now?

ROBIN: That’s what’s weird. His friend who witnessed it is 22 also now. He remembers it like it was yesterday, and he still talks about it with fear. My son remembers it all, but he says, “You know, it’s weird. It’s like I’m remembering a dream.” So his memory of it is different than his friend who saw it. My memory of watching him go through it scares me, but my son’s memory is different. It’s like he blanked a lot of it out. He remembers it, but it’s not fazed him. But he doesn’t talk about it a lot. Yeah, that’s the Hat Man. Started out with the cowboy, then it became the man in the hat, and then the Hat Man.

JIM HAROLD: Wow. Some people describe the Hat Man like it’s a void cut out into the universe. It’s like an outline and then it’s just darkness. But that’s not what your son saw; he saw an actual man in a hat, right?

ROBIN: And it was always leaning against the wall. At first, whenever he talked about the cowboy, we bought him little cowboy hats and fun stuff because we thought it was a cute little imaginary thing. But as he got older and told us about the cowboy, the cowboy never spoke. He always was in a corner and staring at him. And then once he described the hat to us, it was more round like a – I don’t know, it wasn’t a cowboy hat. And all black. Everything was black and scary.

JIM HAROLD: Do you feel that there was something about the history of the place? Where your house is, is there anything about the history, about cowboys or anything you’re aware of?

ROBIN: No, I think he just called it a cowboy because it had a hat on. I don’t really think that it was a cowboy. I think it was this thing. I think it’s always been this thing. My son, I would call him sensitive. He’s had one other episode of something. But I don’t think it was really ever a cowboy. And there’s no history of my house. We are next to a cemetery, but there’s never been anything else other than this. And then since he got to high school and farther, it’s not really been around, other than if we talk about it. I’m always like, “Don’t talk about it. I don’t want it to come back.”

JIM HAROLD: I don’t blame you.

ROBIN: But he’s 22 now, and it went away as he got older.

JIM HAROLD: Well, thank you for sharing this story. I appreciate it. It’s courageous because you worry about it coming back, but thank you very much for sharing it. Maybe other people who are having this experience can say, “I heard Robin tell her story. It’s not just me.” So thank you so much for being a part of the Campfire today, Robin.

ROBIN: Thank you. It was great.

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

JIM HAROLD: Next up on the Campfire is Amber from Tennessee. We’re so glad that she joined us today. I really appreciate it when people share very personal stories, and sometimes they can be difficult stories. But we appreciate Amber and all of our callers who call in to the show. Amber, welcome to the program and please tell us your story.

AMBER: I was married for a while, and my marriage fell apart because of drug addiction. My husband was injured at work, had a severe back injury surgery, got addicted to pain pills, spiraled from there. So that was the demise of our marriage.

JIM HAROLD: I’m sorry.

AMBER: Yeah, it was rough. He wasn’t willing to get the help that was offered to him, so there was just no way of salvaging the relationship. We had a child together, and from the moment I was pregnant, I had always planned on taking a big trip to Disney once my daughter was old enough to really remember and appreciate it. So it was time for this big trip. She was about six. He was still a part of our lives but kind of on the peripheral. He would have visitation with her, but it would be usually supervised with me or my parents. So he was still active in her life as much as was allowable given the situation.

My family took this trip with me. It was myself, my daughter, and both of my parents. We get to Orlando, and the first day that we’re there, low key, we decide we’ll go out to eat. We want to start off our big Disney stuff the following day. We’re at dinner and just sitting down in the restaurant, and out of nowhere, I got the most odd sensation that I’ve ever had in my entire life.

I’ve had other people who have premonition-type experiences in my family and who have explained it as feeling nauseated, but you’re not really nauseated. Like you’re not going to vomit, but it’s kind of similar to that same feeling, but also with a side of detachment. I was completely detached from the environment that I was currently in, and I felt like a combination of, like had been explained to me, nausea, or like I was going to pass out or somewhere between that. But very different than if I was sick or had blood sugar problem or whatever.

It hovered around for a while, to the point where my parents are like, “Do you need to go to the bathroom? Do you need to go out to the car? Do you need to step outside for a minute? Are you okay?” It started easing up after probably about three or four minutes. But I did tell my parents, “I tell you what, just go ahead and get the keys out to the car and set them here, because if I feel like this again, I don’t need to be in here. I’ll just go sit in the car. You guys can finish dinner, and if I haven’t eaten or I can’t eat or whatever, just bring my food out to me and maybe I can eat it later this evening.”

So we go ahead and order, and before the food came to us, it happened again. This time was even stronger. I looked at my parents and I shook my head and grabbed the keys and I started walking out. Now, I remember standing up from the table, and I don’t remember really walking through the restaurant, but before I knew it I was out in the parking lot area along the sidewalk, headed toward the car.

The only thought in my head was complete and utter terror and fear. And I just knew with everything inside of me that I was going to go and lie down and I was going to die, and that my mother was going to come out and find me – to the point where I couldn’t even continue walking in the parking lot. I crouched down to my knees to try to catch my breath and talk myself out of this, thinking, “There’s no reason for me to feel like this. I’m not sick. Why is it like this?” But I still had that nauseated, detached, pass-out kind of feeling. I was sobbing. I just knew that if I went and lay down in the car, I was going to lie down and my mother was going to come out and check on me, and she was going to find me dead.

I finally made it to the car and went ahead and sat in the car. Left the doors open so I could get some air. Also was terrified to close the doors and lie down, as much as I felt like I wanted to. So I sat there for a few more minutes, and by the time my parents and my daughter had eaten dinner, that feeling had passed. I still didn’t feel great. Something just felt off.

I had decided as I was sitting in the car that if I had that feeling again, I was going to have them take me to the hospital, because I’m like, “This might be something weird. Do I have a brain tumor? Something is wrong. I can’t feel like this again.” So we get back to the hotel, everything’s fine, go to sleep, get up the next day, hit Disney, the most magical place on Earth. Which now I can’t usually even make it through seeing a commercial for them because it usually shows the spot in which I had to take a phone call that was very disturbing and life-altering.

We were in line to see a princess, and I checked my phone for the time, and I’ve got three missed calls from my ex-husband’s mother. I looked at my mom over my daughter’s head, and as I’m looking at her, I get a text message from his mom that says, “Please call me as soon as you get this.” I turned to my phone to my mom to show her, and I shake my head, and above my daughter’s head so she can’t see it, I mouth the words, “He’s dead.”

JIM HAROLD: Wow.

AMBER: She shakes her head at me, and my dad picks up on this taking place at the same time, and they’re like, “No, no.” Then my mom comes over, “She knows we’re here. She’s just probably calling to see if you guys are having a good time.”

JIM HAROLD: Not three missed calls in a row.

AMBER: Exactly. We kept in touch, and we still do, with his family, but not back to back stuff. In the next five minutes, I had a missed call from his sister and from his brother. At that point – I knew already when I saw stuff from his mom. I told my parents, “We’ve been in line for an hour and a half. When we see this princess, we’ll do the whole shebang. I need you to take my daughter to the bathroom, to get a snack, to do something. I’m going to go around the corner. I’m going to make a phone call, because I don’t need to be around her when I make this phone call.” They’re still hoping that that’s not what’s going on. I already knew, and I already knew what happened. I knew that he overdosed and he lay down and he died, and his mother found him.

And that is exactly what happened, at exactly the time that I felt it. I called his mom, and she had just found him like an hour before. But the last he had been seen was the night before, right before we had dinner in Orlando, and nobody had seen or heard from him then. From the report from the coroner, his time of death was estimated to be the time that we were at dinner.

JIM HAROLD: Oh my gosh.

AMBER: She found him the next day. She saw his car in the driveway, realized he should be at work. He wasn’t. She goes in to check on him, and that’s where she finds him.

JIM HAROLD: He passed.

AMBER: He died. He died when I had the feeling like I was going to die and my mother was going to find me. I’d heard of people having stuff like this happen before, and I’m like, “I don’t even understand how that happens. That’s so weird. Really? Are people connected enough to do that?” And then it happened to me. It’s the most unreal – I felt his death from states away.

JIM HAROLD: I absolutely believe that is 100% possible. I’ve heard of cases where you’ll have twins, for example, and one will have this horrible pain in their stomach and the other one will have some kind of serious stomach injury. We had a story in my family – this was my grandma, so this is probably going back to the early ’60s or something. My mom was the youngest, so she still lived at home, and her older brother – they had a huge family, but her immediately older brother, the second youngest, was at work. And at this point they didn’t even have telephones. I don’t think they got electricity till the late ’60s. Where they lived was very rural, very much in the sticks.

She said, “Either we’re going to get word that he’s dead or badly hurt.” And he was at work that day, and he worked in the oil fields at that time, and sure enough, he had a serious injury and broke his pelvis. Now, luckily he made a full recovery, but I’ve heard about it in my family. I think there’s a connection and it is real.

Now, speaking of synchronicities, I know we’re running a little long, but I’ve got to share this. We’re recording these calls because we batch-record these calls and then we mix and match them together for a show. Before I took Amber’s call – and I knew Amber was on the list, but I didn’t know the order of calls or anything, and I didn’t realize the Disney tie-in. Anyway, I had a quick lunch before our call. I had about a 20-minute gap between calls, so I took a quick lunch, and my wife came in and said, “Would you like some tea?” I said, “Yeah, you know what” – she’s like, “You probably don’t have time.” I’m like, “No, make it. I’ll have some tea.”

So she grabbed a mug and put it in the mug, and I’m going to show this to Amber. I hope this is not too distressing. Listeners, I’m holding up a Mickey Mouse coffee mug.

AMBER: Oh my gosh.

JIM HAROLD: I just got chills.

AMBER: That is crazy. Out of all the mugs in your house, out of all the times that she could’ve offered you something.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, we probably have 20 different mugs, and I had no idea that this call was going to have Disney in it.

AMBER: Yeah, we were at Disney.

JIM HAROLD: I don’t know what that means, if anything, but…

AMBER: But hey, it’s there.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, it’s real.

AMBER: That’s crazy.

JIM HAROLD: As I take another sip of tea. But that’s the thing. These very, very strange things happen, and I really don’t know why. I don’t know what the reason is, but these synchronicities seem to happen. And your story, Amber, just incredible. And I do believe that people have this connection, even if they’re split or whatever. If you marry someone and you have a kid with them, even if you go your separate ways, that’s a lifelong bond.

AMBER: That’s a bond, yeah. And I am of the belief system that we are all made up of energy, and that energy comes from someplace and that energy is entwined in different ways. Perhaps he and I, our energy force, our souls, whatever you want to call it, were entwined since the beginning. And then, like you said, pair that with the fact that we created a life together, that bond that we share – even when I met him, it just was one of those relationships where within just a couple weeks of meeting him – even my mom probably would’ve told you that she knew from that moment that was the man I was going to marry. It just clicked. Everything fell into place.

It always was a very natural connection between us. It may be something of that nature; it may be, like you said, just because of the bond that we created in this life together. But it was very much mind-blowing for me – an experience that was troublesome, and it definitely has made grieving that loss even harder for me, I feel like, because I felt what he felt, essentially. I felt what was happening to him. So it made me feel even more kind of attached and a part of his dying process, which was very, very strange.

But yeah, I definitely wanted to share that because I know you get all kinds of random stuff and the ghosty stuff and the headscratchers I’m like, I think this probably falls into that.

JIM HAROLD: I think so, yeah.

AMBER: Not really sure where or why or how, but it was there and it was so very real.

JIM HAROLD: Amber, thank you for sharing this very personal story with us tonight on the Campfire.

AMBER: You’re welcome.

JIM HAROLD: Next up on the Campfire is Jane from North Carolina. We’re so glad to have her on the show. She’s going to tell us about a ghost story that is still unfolding, she says. Jane, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us today, and tell us what happened.

JANE: I started at this agency about 10 months ago. We’re a nonprofit, so the agency is housed in a two-story house that was built in the 1930s. We’ve tried to find some background information on it; everything stops at the ’50s, which is going to be frustrating at the end of the story. You’ll be like, “I want to know!” [laughs]

I started there 10 months ago and almost immediately started noticing the smell. It smelled like something was rotting. I’m on the second floor; I’d walk around, and finally I started asking people, “What is that? Is it one of the bathrooms?” People didn’t even know what I was talking about. They didn’t smell it at all. So probably after three or four weeks of me asking, “What is that smell?” and nobody knowing what I was talking about, I figured I’d just leave it alone. But in the back of my mind, I thought, “I wonder if it’s haunting-related,” because my family has a plethora of our own haunting stories from everywhere we lived. In one of the houses we lived in, the haunt came with a smell of rot. It was really kind of creepy.

JIM HAROLD: Ooh.

JANE: I thought about this this whole time. About six months in, it’s the end of the day. My coworker in the office next to mine – she and I are the last ones there. It’s after 5:00. She starts roaming the upstairs, and she’s opening all the doors, she’s checking trashcans. She does this for about 10 minutes, and I finally said, “What are you doing?” She said, “Can you smell that? It smells like something’s rotting. I have looked everywhere. It’s not the trashcan, it’s not the bathrooms. It smells like maybe a bathroom smell, but the bathrooms are fine. It just smells really bad.” We have a living room up there with a copier in it. “It just smells really bad in that living room and nowhere else,” and that’s where I’d been noticing the smell this whole time.

She and I get to chatting outside our offices there, and I said, “Do you believe in ghosts?” She was like, “Oh yeah.” So I told her what I had been experiencing for those past few months, and then I told her my family ghost story that had that smell of rot associated with it. So we both got the shivers and we were comparing stories, and the last thing we said before we locked up for the day was, “I wonder if it heard us talking and if we’re going to notice anything more since it knows that we know that it’s here.”

And sure enough, Jim, it took two days – only two days from that conversation. I came up the stairs one morning. My coworker was just running down the hall with two of our other coworkers who work on the other side of the building, in the offices there. They come running down the hallway and I’m just putting my bags down, and she’s starting to open the attic. I said, “What are you doing?” The attic hatch is right outside my door. She said, “We all just heard footsteps. We heard it multiple times go up and down this hallway. I’m just going to validate that there’s nothing up there.”

Of course, she opened it, she stuck her head up, and I just kept waiting for that horror movie moment, like someone sticks their head up – I would never do that. I’m chicken. [laughs] But she stuck her head up in the attic, looked around. Nothing. There’s not even really floor on that side of the building. It’s just rafters. So we’re all chatting about it, and we go back to that side of the building, and as the four of us are standing there talking, the footsteps happen again up above us. We’re standing there probably about another five minutes; they happened probably three or four more times. They went back and forth a couple of times. It stopped because somebody came in from outside, and then it went quiet. We’re like, “Oh my God, this is just too weird. It knows we know, and now it’s letting us know that it knows we know.”

JIM HAROLD: [laughs] That he knows, that you know…

JANE: So then a week later, we were doing a tour to a woman who worked with another nonprofit. We were just showing her around. We’d never really met her before. We’re walking around upstairs. The way the layout is, my office and my coworker’s office are on one side; there’s a short hallway, there’s a little – we call it the middle meeting room, and then there’s that living room and offices on the other side. So she’s in my office, we’re all talking. She’s getting really uncomfortable, and I thought, “Are we running behind schedule or what? She’s getting so antsy.”

So we go ahead and walk across the hall to the middle room, and she just stops cold and turns and looks at us. We don’t know this woman. She doesn’t know us before this day, so I think she took a chance by saying this. She just stopped, turned around and looked at us very seriously, and said, “I just want you to know there is a male spirit in this room. He was in that office. He’s followed us in here. He isn’t malevolent. He just wants you to know he’s here.” [laughs] We were like, all right, this is a week’s worth of incidents. Now this stranger has told us she’s experiencing it. So we chatted about that a little more.

The following week, word is starting to spread, because there’s always some believers in the office. We’re talking to the believers. One of them says, “Oh my gosh, I just got a new phone a couple months ago, but before we moved into this building last year, I was taking pictures of the outside of it. In one of the pictures, I swear to you there was a man in overalls. He looked sort of like an old farmer. It was definitely an old-timey look, and he was standing up in this back corner window, plain as day.” But she didn’t have the photo anymore. She said it was just too clear to let go of, and that’s why she kept it until she changed phones.

Then we talked to another coworker about it the following week. Actually, this lady had told me she’d experienced this before I’d started sharing anything. We’re a 24/7 facility, so the woman in question was doing third shift. She went up to that second floor living room on her break, probably 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., and was just resting on the couch, and she felt someone sit at the end of the sofa where her feet were.

JIM HAROLD: Oh boy. [laughs]

JANE: She said it was very clear to her it was a male energy. She’s sort of a sensitive person. She said it was a male energy; she felt the cushion, and she didn’t even roll over. She said, “I’m not having it. Leave me alone.” [laughs] So that was the end of that experience.

Then a couple weeks later for her from that experience, the middle room, which is a little meeting room – she’d been up there doing some work that night, and the room started getting hotter and hotter and hotter out of the blue, for no reason. She finally realized she was really being made uncomfortable enough that she wanted to leave, so she packed up her stuff and said, “Okay, it’s all yours. I’m out of here” and she went on down about her business.

Now this is a couple months later from her having those experiences. We’re all sharing these things that are going on. I was talking to her one morning and basically giving her the updates of these stories that are unfolding, and I said, “Denise picked a name for this guy. She’s starting to call him Abraham” – at which point Tanya looked at me and walked off. She put her hands up, turned her back on me, walked off, walked in a big circle. She said, “You’re not going to believe this, Jane. I’ve been calling him Abraham.”

JIM HAROLD: Oh boy, oh boy.

JANE: Got this name. And it kind of fits that time period. Anyway, there was another story – these are all starting to happen back to back, basically between October until December. It’s been a little quiet the past month. She’s talking about Abraham, Denise is talking about Abraham also. We’ve got a new hire that joins us for third shift, and he’s sitting around one morning chatting with us before he leaves and says, “I was up in that middle room last night, and about halfway through what I was doing, it got really, really hot like an oven in there. I got up to go and check the thermostat because the rest of the building is pretty even-temperature. But just that room got so hot, I felt like I needed to leave. When I went back to pick up my stuff, my pens had been moved around and so had my paperwork.” [laughs]

So yeah, we’ve got validation from like nine different people. Some of us experienced these things together, which I’ve had a lot of paranormal experience, but never right there with four other people with me and we’re witnessing it together. Very active haunting, very current. It’s been quiet the past month. We get the whiffs of smell here and there, but never as strong as we used to before we acknowledged that he’s there. So that’s it in a nutshell.

JIM HAROLD: You know what’s going to happen now, don’t you? [laughs] You know what’s going to happen.

JANE: You’re going to have a real Spooky Studio.

JIM HAROLD: That’s right, that’s right. Jane, thank you so much for this great story. Please keep us updated. I hope you’ll come back and tell us more about this Abraham character.

JANE: Will do, Jim. Thanks a bunch.

JIM HAROLD: Stay spooky!

Jim Harold’s Campfire is brought to you by StoryWorth. Mother’s Day is coming up, and I want to make sure that Mother’s Day is extra special for Dar this year. That’s why we as a family are going to give her the unique, heartfelt gift that will make her feel as special and loved as she is – the gift of StoryWorth.

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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 Hailey, and we’re so glad to have her with us today. She’s calling in from West Michigan. She’s going to talk about her mom, who she says is haunted, or at least very sensitive. Hailey, thank you so much for taking time today. I appreciate it. Please tell us what happened.

HAILEY: My mom herself has joked about that she thinks she might’ve been haunted, or she’s at least very sensitive to things, and she does the number one thing that a lot of paranormal movies or other things will say, where it’s like, “Don’t open yourself up to things. Just don’t acknowledge it.” My mom has not abided by that at all. [laughs] Some of the experiences that she has had – and she’s only ever had one bad experience that I’ll get to, but she is the type of person that’s like, “Hey, if you’re here, that’s fine. Let’s just do our own things,” whereas I would rather not acknowledge it at all.

So it’s always been small things where for a little while, in the apartment we were living in, she would see what she thought was my brother out of the corner of her eye because he was the smallest of us at the time. She would see him peeking around the door or coming around the door, almost like he was coming to get her, but then he would be gone. So she’d come out of the room she was in to go find my brother to ask, “Hey, what do you need?” and he’d be doing something in another room, very engrossed in an activity, so very clearly not a kid that just came to find somebody. He didn’t know what she was talking about, didn’t come to get her. That was in the apartment we lived in.

JIM HAROLD: And that was more of a doppelganger situation, it sounds like, no?

HAILEY: She described it as it was more of a shadow. And I don’t know that “shadow figure” would be quite right, but it wasn’t like it looked like him out of the corner of her eye. She said it was a shape that was just about his size, so her brain just filled in the gap that it must be our brother. But she said it was a darker kind of shape.

JIM HAROLD: Interesting.

HAILEY: Yeah. Then we lived in a house that was close to 200 years old. We had the electrician that my mom came home one day, he had been working in the house while she was at work, and he was out on the back porch, very visibly shaken up. She walked up and said, “Hey, how’s it going?” and he immediately went into, “Is your house haunted?” In her head, she was like, “Well, maybe, I don’t know.” But she just said to him, “No, what are you talking about?” He said that he was in the house and he heard a door upstairs repeatedly slamming.

JIM HAROLD: That’s weird.

HAILEY: So he ran out of the house. My mom said, “Well, we have cats. Maybe it was one of the cats knocking around.” He was like, “No.” It was very definitively inside the house and slamming in a way that he really thought it was a person. So they went back in together and looked around the house, one, just to make sure that there wasn’t somebody that had broken in or something weird. There was nothing they could find. We never had that with any other service workers that came to the house. My mom’s theory on that was that the guy was doing something he shouldn’t do and whatever was in the house didn’t like it.

JIM HAROLD: Aha. That makes sense. He was doing something he wasn’t supposed to and the ghost or the spirit or whatever said, “Hey, not in my house!” [laughs] I like that. Not that he did bad things, but that he was stopped.

HAILEY: Yeah. [laughs] And we never had that again. None of us kids ever had anything in the house, other than we were kids, so it was a three-floor house and there were certain rooms that gave us the creeps or we didn’t like being in. But I think that might’ve just been kid things. I don’t know that that necessarily was us feeling anything. It’s mostly circulated around my mom.

The bad experience she had in that house was we had to move out; she and my stepdad were splitting, and my mom had been living in the house for a while with just her in there, with us kids going back and forth between her time and being with my dad and stuff like that. So she was comfortable being alone in the house, and she was not afraid to be alone in the house.

But on the last day that we had the house in possession, right before keys got turned over, my mom said that she had gone through just to walk through and make sure everything looked okay and also say her goodbyes, and she said she walked in and immediately felt unsafe and got a really, really bad feeling. It made her nervous, so she didn’t walk around the house like she had planned on. She did a quicker run-through than she was planning. She said that from the kitchen, she started hearing cupboards slamming. At that point, the cats aren’t in the house anymore because we had moved elsewhere, so everything was out of the house. Everything was locked up when she got in there, so presumably nobody was in the house. When possession got switched over, it wasn’t like “Oh gosh, there was somebody in here.” She said it was just slamming doors in the kitchen. She basically just ran out of the house.

And then recounting that to us, she waited a while to tell us that story, and even after it had been a couple months where she waited to tell us that, she was still very visibly shaken and upset by it.

JIM HAROLD: Right. So your mom obviously – I’ve heard the saying sometimes places aren’t haunted, but people are haunted. You believe that, for lack of a better phrase, your mom is haunted in the sense that she is very sensitive, and in some ways she might act like maybe an antenna and pull this stuff in a little bit?

HAILEY: Yeah. I don’t think she has one particular thing that follows her around, because as far as I know, she hasn’t had anything in where she’s living now. But I think because she is a very open person, if there’s something hanging around, then they’re like, “Oh okay, this lady wants to talk.”

JIM HAROLD: Wow, very cool indeed. Hailey, thank you so much for joining us today on the Campfire, and stay spooky.

HAILEY: Thank you very much.

JIM HAROLD: Nick is on the line from Michigan. He is a longtime listener, and he lives in a haunted house. He’s going to tell us all about it. Nick, welcome to the show and tell us about your haunted house.

NICK: Thanks for having me. Yeah, I think it’s haunted. I think if you ask my wife, she likes to pretend it’s not. [laughs] But I’ll just jump into it. We moved into our house in Michigan here in 2010. It was both my wife’s and my first time moving out of our parents’ house. We got married and moved out here. Little things started to happen when we first moved in. I’d wake up to banging on the walls. We had a shared wall between our living room and our bedroom, so I’d hear three loud bangs. I’d wake up and go out to see what’s going on, nothing’s there. I’d feel like something is staring at me in the darkness. We had a dog, so I would attribute it to that, but when I’d reach, there’d be no dog there to pet.

But it really ramped up when we started to have children. We have three kids. They’re 10, 8, and 5. The craziest thing – well, the start of the crazy stuff was I was mowing the lawn one day, as you do in the summer in Michigan, and I’m always very careful, cautious of if the kids are inside while I’m mowing the lawn or where they are. I was mowing the lawn in my backyard, and I saw a kid – what I assumed was one of my children – run behind one of those Fisher Price plastic play places, those square Fisher Price play places. So I was mowing the lawn and I saw the bottom half. I saw it very clearly; I can still remember it in my mind. It was a red-and-blue striped shirt and overalls. I just saw the bottom half.

I had this guttural reaction. I slammed on the brakes of the lawnmower, and my heart was racing, because I was like, “Oh no, I wasn’t paying attention to where the kids were.” I got off the lawnmower to see who’s outside, what are they doing, where are they, so I could obviously, “Hey, go inside,” finish cutting the lawn. I got up and went behind that Fisher Price play place – nobody was there.

JIM HAROLD: Huh.

NICK: Yeah, it was the weirdest thing. On either side of me – I had an elderly neighbor at the time and I have a neighbor whose kids are in high school. So no kids are around me other than my children. I start to think, “Oh, they’re just moving really fast. They’re hiding from me somewhere, playing a joke on me.” I go inside to talk to my wife, “Hey, where are the kids?” “They’re all downstairs.” No kids were outside. I went downstairs and checked. No kid was there.

JIM HAROLD: How weird.

NICK: Yeah, it was the weirdest thing because I saw it and I had a guttural reaction to stop the lawnmower, and my heart was racing. You have that adrenaline moment. It was so odd. And if it was just that, I could brush that off like my brain was playing tricks on me. But more stuff started to happen.

Later on – I’d say this was a couple months later. It’s not very active. A couple months later, I’m standing in my living room and looking at the TV while I’m folding laundry, and out of the corner of my eye I can see into my kitchen and I see what I think is my son with his head half over the island of our kitchen, like he’s going to scare me. I saw and I said, “It’s either him or my younger daughter. They’re going to try and scare me.” So I sneak around the corner to try and scare them – no kid is there when I get around the corner. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: [laughs] Joke’s on you.

NICK: Exactly. It’s like, “That’s weird.” So then I remember none of my kids are home. They were out with their mom. I was actually home alone at that time. So that was very, very peculiar.

And the most recent thing that’s happened – and this is the last thing that has happened to me in this situation – as kids do, they tend to wake up in the middle of the night and they climb into your bed. They wake up in the middle of the night for some reason, they go to Mom and Dad’s room. Well, kids sleep like maniacs in big beds. [laughs] They flip around, they kick you, all sorts of stuff. I decided, “I’m not going to deal with that tonight. I’ll go lie in their bed.” My youngest daughter woke up, I went into her bed and lay in it. It was a small twin bed.

I’d fallen asleep and I felt a tug on the bedsheets. I was like, she must’ve woken up, wanted to come back into bed, and was trying to get me up. I kept waiting for her to come around – nothing. She didn’t come around, “Hey, Dad, I’m going to sleep here.” The tugs kept getting harder. So then I thought it was maybe our dog had gotten a hold of the covers and was tugging on them, which she’s never done. So I started to pull, and I had this resistance as I’m pulling. I had to pull really hard, and eventually I pulled and the sheets broke free and they shot up at me. I opened my eyes to see what was going on and there was nothing there. Whatever had been pulling on the sheets, no dog, no kid. Everybody was asleep.

I was like, “That’s weird, but it’s a small bed. Maybe something happened. Maybe I somehow made that resistance happen.” But then two weeks later, the same thing happened. I was lying in my bed – actually, everybody was asleep – but I felt that tug on the sheets again. And this was in my bed. We have a big king bed. I was like, “That’s odd.” I started tugging on the sheets again, and whatever was causing that resistance, I tugged and it broke free. I opened my eyes this time. I don’t know why I didn’t do that the first time, but I opened my eyes this time – the sheets are tucked into the footboard of the bed.

JIM HAROLD: Huh.

NICK: Yeah, I don’t know that caused that to happen, but that’s pretty much it. That’s been my experience.

JIM HAROLD: It doesn’t sound like super terrifying, just more maybe annoying. Is that right?

NICK: Yeah. I don’t tell this story often, but when I do, people ask me, “What do you think it is?” I think it’s a little kid because it seems like it’s playing tricks on us. Little things.

JIM HAROLD: And not enough to encourage you to leave.

NICK: No, and that’s the thing. It’s really just happened to me. If it’s happened to my wife, she’s not telling me. [laughs] She doesn’t want to feed into it. My kids have said they’ve seen shadows or that sort of thing. My son has a loft bed and he said that he was sleeping with his hand draped off the side, and he felt a bony hand grab his hand one night.

JIM HAROLD: Oh man.

NICK: Yeah, but nothing bad. It’s always just been kind of good clean fun. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: Well, thank you so much for telling us your story, Nick. I appreciate it. No thoughts of leaving the place, huh?

NICK: We want to leave, but more because we’ve outgrown the house than anything else. But no, no plans right away to leave.

JIM HAROLD: Well, if you leave and the ghost comes with you, please let us know.

NICK: I definitely will.

JIM HAROLD: Thanks for being a part of the Campfire, and stay spooky.

NICK: Stay spooky, Jim!

JIM HAROLD: Jim Harold’s Campfire is sponsored by BetterHelp. You know, getting to know yourself can be really a lifetime process. I don’t really think I started to understand myself until my forties, and it’s still a process that’s ongoing. One way to help speed that along is therapy, because therapy is about deepening your self-awareness, your understanding of yourself. Honestly, sometimes we don’t even know what we really want in life, why we react the way we do, until we talk through things. And that’s where BetterHelp comes in. It connects you with a licensed therapist who can take you on that journey.

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You’re listening to Jim Harold’s Campfire.

JIM HAROLD: Beth is on the line. She’s about an hour west of Seattle, and she says she’s sensitive and the story that she’s going to share today is when she realized beyond the shadow of a doubt that she could see the occasional dead person. Beth, thank you so much for taking time, and please tell us that story. That really leaves me on the edge of my seat.

BETH: Thank you for having me. I think I’ve been sensitive for quite a while, but this was the first time that there was evidence outside of myself, I guess. It was about 2009-ish, and I was staying with my parents for a temporary period of time because I was transitioning jobs and I had lost my roommate. I mean, she was married. She didn’t die. [laughs] Anyway, I moved in with them just for a few months.

I feel like it’s important to note that it wasn’t the house I grew up in. My parents had moved into a mobile home park in a town called Milpitas in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. Their neighborhood was not English-speaking. It was a very heavily Vietnamese area. I didn’t know any of the neighbors; most of them didn’t speak English beyond friendly waves and body language communication.

Anyway, story starts in a typical way, I guess. I had an alarm clock because back in those days, iPhones weren’t as advanced. I had a digital alarm clock in the guest room of my parents’ home. It was about 2:30 in the morning. I worked a job, and my shift started – I think it was like 3:15 a.m. My alarm went off, I sat up in bed, I was trying to get my eyes acclimated to the room. They had horizontal blinds, like your typical mini blinds, on the window. There was a light behind them outside.

Something drew my attention to the lines on the wall that the light was casting, and I sat up in bed and was adjusting my eyes and I realized that I could see the lines bending in the shape of a person, which immediately startled me. I was awake. [laughs] I was fully awake at that point because it totally startled me. They didn’t have a light on their bedside table, so I picked up this digital alarm clock and held it out in front of me, and it cast this red neon light across the room.

There was this tiny woman standing against the back wall. It was the wall that was opposite from me. I remember every detail. She had like Einstein hair. She had this white hair that was kind of sticking up, like what you see in Einstein pictures. It was flat in the back like she’d had her head on a pillow for a long time. She had this – I’m assuming it was a white nightgown. Everything looked kind of pink because I was using this digital alarm clock to illuminate the room. But it was this little nightgown, and it had flowers and it was really wrinkly in the back.

I just remember thinking, “Oh my gosh, one of my parents’ neighbors has gotten into our house and is standing at the foot of this bed.” Basically, she turned around, and it was this old Asian woman, and she looked so confused. She looked tired and confused, and she saw me. She looked at me and she tilted her head, and she just had this puzzled look on her face, like, “Where am I? What’s happening?”

She started walking towards me. I’m sitting up in bed and she starts walking towards me, and I’m like climbing up the wall. It hasn’t hit me that this is a ghost. It hasn’t hit me at all. I just think somebody has broken into my parents’ house, this poor woman probably has dementia or something. It was so fast that I didn’t have time to process it all. But I kind of started climbing up the wall, and she was right next to the bed and she was looking at me, and then she just atomized.

I don’t know how to explain it. I have a six-year-old who plays with bubbles all the time, and when a bubble pops, for a split second you see all these little dots in the shape of the bubble. That’s kind of what happened. It was slower, but she just went from a solid being that was bending light earlier – I could see color, I could see wrinkles, I could see her expression, I could not see through her – she was a person. She was a solid person, and she just atomized and disappeared.

This was my first experience like that. I jumped out of bed, turned the light on. The door was closed, which I hadn’t noticed before, but I thought if it was a person, they would’ve had to open the door to get in. But I remember getting dressed as quick as I could. My parents lived in a mobile home park, and I had to walk a block to get to my car. I’ve never been so freaked out in my life, but I remember walking in the dark to get to my car. I hear stories about people going back to sleep after they see something, and that was not this story. I was so startled and so awake.

Anyway, I remember telling my mom later in that day, “This is what I saw.” I explained it in detail to her. I’m a pretty vivid dreamer, but I always know when I’m dreaming, and I was not dreaming. I was awake. I was definitely awake. I remember my mom being like, “Well, I believe that you believe that you saw this lady.” She totally didn’t believe me.

Anyway, fast forward maybe six months to a year. I don’t remember the specifics; it was a long time ago. But I was working a different job and living in my own apartment again, and she called me while I was at work. I remember her being like, “I have something interesting to tell you. If you’re working, you might want to go somewhere private if this is an okay time to talk.” I said, “Sure, sure.”

Again, we didn’t really know the neighbors. A lot of them didn’t speak English. But I guess in the time that had passed, she did get to know a neighbor that was catty corner, and essentially the neighbor told her that she had a ghost in her house and described it to my mom, and it was like the exact same description of what I had told my mom. Then, I don’t have the exact dates, but the neighbor told her that essentially, the time that I saw her, around that time is about when another neighbor had died that she knew. She was like “I know this lady. She’s haunting my house,” described the exact same thing down to the muumuu she was wearing and how her hair appeared.

So I don’t know. Did I see her the night she died? That’s kind of my hunch. Maybe she just didn’t quite understand what was going on. She looked very confused. It was the first story where somebody else’s story matched up to mine. It was so vivid. So yeah, that’s it.

JIM HAROLD: I’d love for you to come back on the show and tell some of your other stories, but in short, this set off a series of events, and you’ve had other events where you’ve seen dead people, so to speak?

BETH: I have to say, I’ve seen a lot of things. Most of the time when I see people, it is in a full-body – a lot of times I don’t even know until I say something. I work in healthcare, and I’m usually the last person – I’m a respiratory therapist, so I operate life support. So I’m usually the person that pulls the plug. I’ve seen a lot of – just a lot of weird experiences. And they always look like real people, so a lot of times the way I find out that nobody else sees them is I will say, “Oh, who was that woman holding the patient’s hand?” or whatever.

So yeah, I’ve got a lot of stories for you for another day.

JIM HAROLD: We’ll absolutely love to hear those. Beth, thank you so much for sharing this story and being a part of the Campfire.

BETH: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

JIM HAROLD: Next up on the show is Christy from Florida. She’s been listening for several months now. Typed in “Paranormal Podcast” – the Paranormal Podcast, my other show if you haven’t checked it out, popped up. She started listening to that, and now she’s become a big Campfire fan, and we’re so glad about that. We talk about the idea of haunted objects, and I think Christy might have a really good story for us about that subject. Christy, welcome to the show and tell us what happened.

CHRISTY: Thank you. There’s actually two stories I’m going to tell. They both are related to objects, and it makes me wonder, are objects actually haunted, or do spirits just visit these objects?

The first one is when my daughter was probably three or four years old, my mother-in-law has this toy Woody doll from Toy Story on a shelf, so my daughter saw it and she was pointing to it, wanting to play with it. My mother-in-law said, “No, that’s for decoration only because that was my dad’s favorite character, and he loved having that on his shelf.” So I pick up my daughter and go into the kitchen. Seconds later, we hear thunk. We’re like, “What’s that?” We go back in there, and that Woody doll is on the ground.

JIM HAROLD: Oh, that’s funny.

CHRISTY: Like you say, too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence, I’d say. I was like, “Okay, I’m pretty sure he’s okay if she plays with that. I think that was him saying ‘let her play with it.’” [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, I think so. I mean, what are the chances?

CHRISTY: It had been sitting there for so long.

JIM HAROLD: I’m assuming there’s other stuff on the shelf, right?

CHRISTY: Yes.

JIM HAROLD: Why didn’t that other stuff fall if it’s just a coincidence?

CHRISTY: No explanation.

JIM HAROLD: Because it’s not a coincidence. [laughs]

CHRISTY: That was the first one. The second story has to do with my great-grandfather. He lived to be well into his nineties, and he lived most recently in Northern Georgia. I didn’t see him very often, but once he needed care, my grandmother – that was her father – brought him down to where we lived so that the facility he was in, she could go see him very often. She also had a brother who lives around us, so he could go see him also. He loved my son. He used to always call him “Prince George,” and any time he would talk to my grandma, he would ask, “How’s Prince George doing?”

When he passed – I think it was on January 2nd, and then a year later, my son randomly – he was very young, in the back of my car, we’re driving down the road and he says, “I miss Great-Grandpa. He used to call me Prince George.” I was like, “Yeah, you’re right. He loved you a lot.” Then I look at the date, and it had been exactly a year since he had died. So I thought, that’s random also.

JIM HAROLD: Wow. Wow, wow, wow.

CHRISTY: I know, it’s crazy. Once my great-grandfather did pass away, he had a wife; she also lived up in Northern Georgia. She died shortly after, so that left my grandma and my uncle to take care of the estate, get everything sold. They ended up bringing a lot of stuff down, and my uncle was in charge of selling a lot of it. He had some garage sales. He sold some stuff on Facebook. But in this particular story, we’re talking about two ceramic roosters, about two feet tall. They would’ve sat on the kitchen counter or something. He sells these, and that night he gets a knock on his door – and I’m talking about 3:00 a.m., a knock on your door. He doesn’t really want to answer, but he sees that it’s this gentleman that he has sold these roosters to.

He finally opens the door, and this gentleman is like, “Take these roosters! I don’t want them.” [laughs] “They’re bad. They’re cursed.” My uncle is stunned. He really doesn’t know what to say. It’s middle of the night, he’s been woken up, crazy story here. He’s like, “What happened?” He says, “Me and my wife both witnessed two spirits, you could say, I suppose. One was an older man who walked with a cane or something, and he was in the background, but there was also this red-headed woman. She was yelling at us.” I didn’t get the details about what was said, but she wasn’t happy about something.

I guess these people put two and two together. Maybe these objects had just come into their house, and now “I’m seeing spirits and they’re not happy.” So he said, “Nope!” and I’m guessing that’s when he drove straight to where he got them and said, “Take them back.” So my uncle was like, “Okay, I’ll take those, give a refund.” He went back to bed totally puzzled.

The description that he gave of the spirits fits my great-grandfather and his wife. She had fiery red hair. He described fiery red hair. She wasn’t a very nice person. [laughs] So it kind of would fit, that description.

JIM HAROLD: Wow. Haunted roosters.

CHRISTY: Haunted roosters.

JIM HAROLD: But I do believe there is that potential.

CHRISTY: I agree, and that’s what makes me think – I really would hope that my great-grandfather and his wife are not attached to these roosters, their spirits aren’t attached. But then it makes me think: can you ask a spirit – I feel like you must know what’s going on. That’s why Woody fell off the shelf. That’s why on the anniversary of his death, my son started talking about him. And now they realize that these roosters have gotten into the hands of somebody they don’t particularly like. I don’t know. It was weird.

JIM HAROLD: Do you know where the roosters ended up?

CHRISTY: My uncle ended up selling them again, and nothing that we’ve heard of, at least, has happened. It is interesting. I do maybe have a theory. My great-grandfather’s wife, I had never personally met her, but I heard stories. Like I said, she wants maybe the nicest person. I would say she’s very close-minded. The people who we sold the roosters to were of a different culture than us, so I’m wondering if maybe she didn’t like that. And that’s really sad that maybe you don’t change on the other side. Or maybe not right away.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, that would be sad if somebody’s discriminating.

CHRISTY: From the other side.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, that would be very sad. Wow. I got to tell you, I think there is something to this haunted object thing. Is every object haunted? I don’t believe that. But I think it can be positive. I also think it can be negative. If for whatever reason they had that kind of spirit about them, who knows? Maybe they lingered on through those materials. Wow, that’s interesting. Never, I can say, in the almost 14 years of the Campfire, we’ve never had a call about haunted roosters, Christy.

CHRISTY: Haunted ceramic roosters. It seems very random, but…

JIM HAROLD: Well, they’re objects, right? We’ve had a haunted lamp, I had a haunted recliner in the very early days of the show that somebody got though somebody who knew somebody. Haunted painting. I think these things do happen. Christy, thank you so much of being a part of the Campfire. I certainly appreciate it.

CHRISTY: Thank you.

JIM HAROLD: Jandi is on the line from Florida, and we’re so glad to have her. She has a lot of ghost stories to tell us. Today she’s going to tell us one or two. Jandi, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us, and tell us what happened.

JANDI: Thank you. During the ’90s, we lived in a ranch-style home. This was the first home we’d ever bought. It was an older home, maybe 40-50 years old, but it was in good condition. I think things started going wrong when my parents decided to start doing some construction in the house. Of course, back then nobody knew that that would set off a chain of events.

The things that would happen would be keys would be missing, you’d hear voices, they would steal jewelry and things like that. Just things that could be kind of explained away. But it became a little bit darker once my mom opened up an assisted living for elderly people. After that – this was all after the construction took place – it ramped up and it became to where people were physically being hurt or pushed around. A lot of nightmares, things like that. I had one episode of sleep paralysis, and that was the one and only time I ever had it. I’ve really never had it before, but it was real scary.

I would like to sleep in the mornings, and Mom had a nice king size bed, so after she got up and started her work, I would go in there and nap a little bit till it was time to get up. That one day – it was morning – I remember looking out the window, and I could see that the blinds were – you know the rolling shade? It was just up a little bit, so I could see the sun coming in and I could hear the traffic outside. We lived on a busy street. I couldn’t move my body.

I started getting real scared. I tried to talk or scream. I couldn’t. But all the while, my eyes are the only thing that’s open. I didn’t get that tunnel vision thing where people say, “I could only see a tunnel in the darkness.” I didn’t see that. All I saw was the room as it was and a white haze, like a white hazy cloud over me. It was over me probably about 30 seconds. Seemed like a lifetime.

Once it let go and I could move my body – because I felt like my body was pinned or immobile – then I heard it fall. Whatever that thing was, I heard it fall, hit the bed, and scamper out of the room. When I say scamper, the thing that came to mind was like you know how your dog runs around and their little feet, their little claws scratch up your tile or whatever? That’s how it sounded, like something was scurrying out the door. It exited the door and the door slammed in the bedroom. I remember my mom’s bedroom door was not closed; it was almost shut, but not shut.

I could move then. I got up and I went into the living room. My parents were in the kitchen. I said, “Were either one of you guys in the room right now?” The first thing I said was, “Where’s the cat?” because I had this black cat who always liked to play his shenanigans. The cat was not around. Nobody had been in the room. I was freaked out. I told my parents what happened, and I saw them look at each other. It’s like they were having this nonverbal conversation – you know what I mean? They were looking at each other like “Oh gosh, here we go.”

Apparently, stuff had been going on before this, but they didn’t tell me because they didn’t want to scare me. I think that was the scariest thing that happened to me.

Another thing that happened, my dad had closed off the garage to give me a nice bedroom with more privacy for myself, because at this point I was in nursing school. It was still living at home. So my dad closed up the garage and I had my own little space there. There was a window, one window and one door leading out to the front. The garage door was closed off.

One night, it was about midnight, I heard this bloodcurdling scream. A scream like – it woke me up. It sounded like, I would imagine, someone being murdered.

JIM HAROLD: Oh my.

JANDI: Like someone’s being attacked, hurt. This is what I thought in my mind. I was like, “Oh my gosh, somebody’s in trouble!” But I was too chicken to look out my window. I didn’t want to look out the window. The ranch-style homes, the bedrooms are all the way at the other side of the house, and then the kitchen is all the way on the other side of the house. My room was by the kitchen. Her room was way, way across. But she heard the screaming too.

She ran. She thought something was wrong with me. She ran in there and she’s like, “What’s going on?” I said, “Mom, it’s red outside the window.” She’s always been a brave lady. She opens the curtains and she said, “Oh my God, there’s a man and he’s sweeping. He’s sweeping his yard.” At midnight with a broom, sweeping his yard.

It turns out this man was our neighbor, and he had died like two weeks before. This neighbor was involved in some sort of a property dispute with another neighbor, and that property ran right by like a long driveway that – it was like an empty lot next to us, and that’s where his property was. I think he just wanted to be recognized that that was his. Even though he was dead, “that’s still my property.”

JIM HAROLD: I think that’s true. People from beyond, maybe sometimes they become very possessive of a place or property or a thing. I think that is a thing.

JANDI: It was crazy. It happened two nights in a row. The second night that it happened, same thing – around midnight, the screaming went on, but this time my mom didn’t come. I think she’d fallen asleep or whatever. This time I didn’t look either, because I’m still chicken, but I was like, if you give it attention, he’s just going to keep coming back. So I’m not going to give him any attention. I’m just going to pretend he’s not doing this, and he’s going to go away. And he did. He never came back. But that was really a weird one.

JIM HAROLD: Indeed.

JANDI: I have one more short story.

JIM HAROLD: I know you do. Unfortunately, we have another caller that we have to get to. I hope you’ll sign back up.

JANDI: I will.

JIM HAROLD: Jandi, thank you so much for being a part of the Campfire today.

JANDI: Thank you, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: Thank you for listening to another edition of the Campfire. I want to reiterate what we talked about with the tour earlier, but first, a very important shoutout.

Maggie writes: “Hi, Jim! My whole family has been listening to the Campfire since about 2019. We love hearing the stories everyone shares, especially my son Christian. Could you do a shoutout for him?” Well, Maggie, absolutely we can do a shoutout to Christian and your family. Thank you guys for listening to the show, and Christian, I really appreciate it. Your mom says you’re a great kid, and thank you so much for listening to the Campfire – and of course, stay spooky!

Always love to do those shoutouts, especially for great folks like Christian and his mom, Maggie. Now we are going to get back to the tour and restate what we told you earlier. I’m so excited about this. I hope you’ll be able to join me.

I am going on tour! We’re going to start out with four cities. We hope it’s very successful and we can continue it on, but we are going to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on June 21st, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on June 22nd, New York, New York, on June 24th, and Boston, Massachusetts, on June 25th.

And again, we hope you’ll join us there to get your tickets on general sale. Go to jimharold.com/tour, and that is on Friday, April 14th at 10 a.m. Eastern. Thank you for joining us today and listening to these great stories. We’ll talk to you next time. Have a great week, everybody, and stay spooky! Bye-bye.

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

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