A haunted classic car, urban exploring gone wrong and much more spookiness on this week’s Campfire!

TRANSCRIPT

Was our caller haunted by an evil classic car? No, it’s not Stephen King – at least in this case. It’s a real-life story on this edition of Campfire.

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

JIM HAROLD: Welcome to this edition of Campfire. So glad to be with you, and thank you so much for tuning in. This is the place where we share real stories, true life stories from real people about strange things that have happened to them. Could be ghosts, could be cryptid creatures, could be headscratchers – whatever they are, they are fascinating and they are true, and we’re so glad to be with you again.

If you like what we do, please make sure that you follow in the podcast app of your choice – Apple Podcasts, Spotify – rate and review, and also, something else struck me the other day: there’s nothing to prevent you from hitting the “Share” button and just texting someone with the link to our show. That would be really cool. So if you have a friend who loves spooky stuff, just go on your favorite app, share like you would share something else, and actually literally text them the link to the show. That’s a great way of spreading the word to people who love the spooky like you, and I would appreciate it.

We have one piece of business before we get to some great, great spooky stories, really remarkable stories this week, we wanted to say happy birthday and a big “stay spooky!” to Joanie. Trudy wanted us to do that, so Joanie, happy birthday and stay spooky, and thanks for being a loyal listener of the Campfire.

If you want to get your own personal video birthday shoutout, you can do that by going over to Cameo.com/thejimharold. Cameo.com/thejimharold. Not only birthdays – anniversaries, special occasions, whatever it might be. Cameo.com/thejimharold. Now let’s get right to the great content. This first story, Campfire classic. Absolutely love it.

Sean is on the line from Oregon, and boy, does he have a story for us. I’m not going to spoil it. Sean, welcome to the show and tell us this remarkable story.

SEAN: Thanks for having me, Jim. When I was in high school, I’ve always been a huge car nut, and I was just perusing Craigslist one night and found a listing for a 1972 Cadillac Fleetwood that was about 45 minutes away from home. I convinced my dad to go look at the car with me.

We got there, and it was really interesting because the car was parked unreasonably far from the house. The house was on one corner of the property, and the car was on a completely other side of the property, just sitting out in the open. It was just a little interesting.

When I knocked on the door, the woman that owned it answered, and she had this really nervous demeanor, I would say, when I told her that I was here to look at the car. She goes, “Okay, I need to have my husband put a battery in the car.” I said, “Oh, you don’t keep a battery in the car?” Her husband comes up and says, “No, we absolutely never keep a battery in the car.”

JIM HAROLD: Interesting.

SEAN: I thought that was kind of odd. So he goes and puts a battery in the car. He himself does not say more than that to me. After he put the battery in the car, he just made himself scarce. So I test drove it, and I liked the car, so I ended up buying it. They seemed to be in a hurry to get rid of it.

But on the way home, a huge rainstorm come through just out of nowhere that evening. I was driving in front of my dad, who was in the other car, and he calls me and says, “Hey, I can’t even tell if my headlights are working. Can you turn and look and see if they are?” We were on a pretty straight highway. There weren’t any curves coming up or anything. All I did was turn to look in my blind spot for about a split second, and all of a sudden I’m driving right into the ditch, going to cross the median and go into oncoming traffic. 

JIM HAROLD: Oh gosh.

SEAN: It startled me because the median was a drop from the road, so the car just all of a sudden sank. It was like I had turned right into it. But I swear that I was driving straight as an arrow. So I corrected it and didn’t think much of it after that.

Fast forward a couple weeks, I started to do things to the car. I started to clean it up a little bit, put custom exhausts, new radio into it, stuff like that. And I started to have constant nightmares. It began one night, and they would just come and go every night. It was pretty much the same nightmare every night, which was where I would be walking out in the middle of nowhere and I’d find this really old farmhouse, this huge farmhouse. It was abandoned, and I would just wander in to explore it.

I always made my way upstairs, but I never got any further than the first bedroom. I’d go in there and there would be a little girl in the corner of the bedroom. I could never see her face; her hair was always draped in front of it, and she would just charge me. She would run at me. She had really long fingers, and she’d wrap her fingers around my throat. In the dream, I would not be able to breathe, and I would wake up from that dream just drenched in sweat and hyperventilating, trying to catch my breath. At times when I first woke up, I wouldn’t really be able to move. I would feel like I’m presently being choked. No longer in the dream, like somebody is sitting on top of me and choking me.

These dreams didn’t stop. They were happening every night. Then after a couple weeks, they started to change to where I would start walking to the farmhouse, and it would be like it was brand new. There’d be a family out front having a picnic. But the closer I got to the house, everything aged rapidly. The people would age and the house would age, and eventually the family would end up looking dead and the house would be in the initial condition in the first dream. It always ended the same way, going to that same bedroom, and that same little girl would be there and she would try to choke me.

It even started to affect my friends after a while. I had one really good friend and we were out driving the car one day, and we ended up passing another car that got into the left turn lane. When I drove past this car, I was expecting to hear the sound of the exhaust just echoing off of it, but the only thing that I heard as we passed this car that only had a little old lady in it was this little girl, like a bloodcurdling scream.

I turned to my friend and I said, “Did you hear that?” He said, “Yeah, the little girl screaming?” I said, “There was no little girl anywhere around us when that happened.” He got freaked out and refused to be in the car at all. He just decided that he was done. [laughs]

The nightmares persisted. They would range from bad to worse. I was losing sleep. It was a really amazing but freaky time. Eventually I put the car up for sale because I was tired of the car, and I was tired of having all these nightmares, and I had started to make that connection that it was the car doing all of this.

Before I sold it, my friends and I had all taken a trip out to an abandoned property that was way outside of town. It was a place where all of us high school kids would go to give us a little scare. [laughs] We got there – we had been there before and knew everything that was around the house, and we start walking around and I find car parts sitting in the dirt. And they were parts for that Cadillac. I had driven the car there, and I found parts outside of this farmhouse for that car.

I thought, “That’s really bizarre. I’ve been here before and I’ve never seen these here, and nobody’s lived on this property for decades.” So that was really weird.

And then I finally found a buyer for the car, and as soon as I signed the title over to him, he asked if I could store the car for him for a little extra cash for a month. I agreed, a little reluctantly because I wanted the car gone. As soon as that car’s title was no longer in my name, everything stopped. The nightmares stopped. All the bad vibes from that car went away, just poof. Even though I had it on the property, just storing it in a car port, it never affected me after that. It was like everything just stopped.

JIM HAROLD: Wow. It was a little bit like Christine.

SEAN: A little bit. And I’m a huge fan of that movie, and I’d always thought, “I wonder what it would be like to have a haunted car.” I now know. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: So what do you think – over the years, I’m thinking you’ve got to develop some kind of theories. Do you think something bad happened in the car? What do you think went on?

SEAN: That was my best guess. It was a sinister-looking car. It was a triple black car. It was black paint, black vinyl top, black interior. Even my mom told me that that car was nothing but a big bully. [laughs] It was just a very sinister-looking car, and it had this really bad energy around it, like something awful had happened in its past or it was a part of something awful that had happened.

The best theory that I had come up with was that the little girl I was seeing had come to some traumatic, horrible end, and maybe her spirit was attached to the car, maybe it was an old family vehicle. That was about the best theory I could come up with. I even tried googling “abandoned farmhouses” in the state we lived in to see if I could find anything that resembled the house I was seeing in my dreams. I never could. And I tried looking up if there was any awful murders or deaths that had happened revolving around that time era, and I could never find anything. But that was my best theory for that.

JIM HAROLD: It’s a cool story. Sean, thank you so much for being a part of the Campfire today.

SEAN: Thank you for having me, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: Andy is on the line from North Carolina. He’s going to take us back several years. All I can say is if you go exploring in the dark, in the night, be careful what you find. You might find a little more than you expected. That’s what happened to Andy and some of his friends. Andy, welcome to the show and tell us what happened.  

ANDY: Thank you, Jim. I’ll just jump in right here. This took place back in 2013 in Tennessee, where I grew up. I was about 17 at the time, so I was still in high school, still living with my parents. That summer, me and my friends made a habit of urban exploring, finding cool nooks and crannies that you wouldn’t normally go to. We liked looking at graffiti, maybe tagging a bit ourselves – you know, teenager stuff.

For a few weeks, me and one of my buddies had been eying this place outside the city that you can see from the interstate as you come in. It’s this old manufacturing district, just a bunch of abandoned warehouses and factories. We’d been talking for a good few weeks about trying to hit this place up, working up the courage, because you know, that’s a little bit of a spooky scene. [laughs]

Finally, one night me and my friend are downtown, it’s pretty late, and we talk each other into it. So we bike our way from downtown to this area. We have to hop a fence, and we start walking around in between these warehouses, just exploring – you can see where old machinery used to be, just all this interesting kind of stuff – till we find this warehouse that one side of it is just open. So we can walk straight into it.

So we head in and are looking around when we see that on the other side of the warehouse, there’s this door. We both start joking with each other, being like, “Okay, you go open it,” “No, you go open it,” “No, you,” until finally we agree that we’ll go together, we’ll check this out.

We go and open the door and walk in, and immediately I can tell something’s up. This is the middle of the summer, so it’s a warm, humid night, but immediately I can feel this chill sweep my body. This room, probably about six or seven feet up the wall, there’s these windows that lined the room. So you can see a little bit of ambient city light and some moonlight coming up. It’s a bit dim, but you can see.

We look in the center of the room, and there’s what I can only describe as about half a dozen shadowy figures, like shades, just in the center of the room. Immediately, I’m frozen. I’m terrified. I have not seen anything like this before in my life. Me and my buddy just stand there, awestruck, and these figures turn to face us, and next thing I know, I’m on the floor. It’s hours later. It’s almost morning. My buddy’s next to me.

I’m feeling this way that, now that I’m a little bit older, I can only describe as like the worst hangover of my life. Just a feeling of absolutely tired, energy gone, absolutely feeling out of it. I shake my buddy, we get up and we start talking. We both saw the same thing; we both felt the same way. It wasn’t something that I just imagined or anything. We both saw that, and it’s honestly the most unexplainable, scary thing that’s ever happened to me. 

JIM HAROLD: Now these figures, were they solid, or were they translucent?

ANDY: I would say they were pretty solid. I couldn’t see through them, so they were pretty solid black.

JIM HAROLD: Do you think that you were possibly drugged? Or do you think there’s some kind of energy vampires? What do you think happened?

ANDY: I don’t think we were drugged. We’d been hanging out the night before, totally normal, nothing going on there. I don’t know. I definitely felt like it drained, like it had been taken out of me. We were both just completely out of it the next day and took a day to recover from that.

JIM HAROLD: When you woke up – I mean, if that were me, I would get out of there as quickly as possible, but did you have an opportunity to look around? Was there any evidence of some kind of ritual or ceremony or something that these figures had left, possibly?

ANDY: When we woke up, the room was empty. We went back to our bicycles; we didn’t stick around to find out. But from what I can remember, there was no noticeable remnants of anything.

JIM HAROLD: Boy, this sounds like an episode of Stranger Things. [laughs] Let me ask you this: now, with the benefit of time and adulthood and looking back, what sense, if any, do you make of it?

ANDY: In life, there’s just a lot of absurd things that happen. I nowadays chalk it up to just something out of the normal, something I can’t explain that has kind of taught me to watch out where I go. [laughs] And not to stray too far into places I’m not prepared to go. I would say it’s just one of those strange, unexplainable things.

JIM HAROLD: Indeed. And per your point, I’m guessing the urban exploring went down a little bit after that.

ANDY: Yeah. We definitely didn’t go back there, and we kept it to downtown.

JIM HAROLD: Whew. Scary stuff, scary stuff. Thank you so much for joining us today, Andy, on the Campfire.

ANDY: Thanks so much, Jim.

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JIM HAROLD: Next up on the Campfire is Tracy from Texas. She’s been listening for over five years, and we’re so glad she’s here tonight. She has multiple stories, but today she’s going to tell us one from a home she moved into. It was the first house she moved into, I assume after her parents’, where she lived with some roommates and some strange things happened. Tracy, welcome to the show and tell us your story.

TRACY: Hi. Thanks for having me. We lived in this house fresh out of high school, and we kind of already knew that something was going on because my friend’s family had lived there right before us. My friend and I shared the master bedroom and had it set up like a dorm room, and we had a mirror right outside the bathroom. When you walked by it, you could see the closet and the entry door from this mirror.

So I’m getting ready one night and I’m walking in and out, and out of the corner of my eye I see somebody standing in the closet. I look over and there’s nobody in the closet; I look back, nobody in the mirror again. I was like, “That’s kind of weird.” Go about, walking in and out of the door, getting ready still. Out of the corner of my eye again in the mirror, I see somebody now standing in the doorway of the closet.

I look straight at the mirror, and sure enough, there’s someone standing there. But when I look at the closet, nobody there. I was like, “All right.” Went and told my roommate. He’s like, “Just hang out in the living room. I’ll come get you when I’m done getting ready and I’ll come in there and sit with you.” I don’t know if it was ADD that kicked in or whatever, but I was like, “This is nonsense. I’m going to get ready. It was my imagination, whatever. I’m going back.”

JIM HAROLD: It’s not going to stop you.

TRACY: Exactly. So I go back in there, finish getting ready, walk out one last time out of the bathroom, look in the mirror – she is now standing outside of the closet, in my room. I said, “Nope! Good enough,” and I left for the night. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: I know you have some other stories, and we’ve got plenty of time here. You said you wanted to share two of the scariest moments in the house. What were those two scariest moments?

TRACY: That was one of them, and the other one happened to my friend Christie, who I shared the room with. She was taking a shower early one morning, and you know, when you turn the shower off, that’s an autopilot thing. You don’t even think about doing that. So she has her hands on it, and in those seconds where she turned the water off, she feels a breath on the back of her neck. And then these two hands run down her arms, make her grip the handles, and turn the shower back on full force.

JIM HAROLD: Oh man.

TRACY: Yeah. Same bathroom. I’m assuming the same girl. She sang to me one time when I was in the shower, and I ripped the curtain open and nobody was there.

JIM HAROLD: So basically, it put the hands around her hands, gripped them, and turned them on. So it was involuntary on her part. She wasn’t turning it back on; she was being forced to turn it on physically.

TRACY: Oh yeah. Definitely.

JIM HAROLD: That’s a little different than just seeing a ghost. That goes into the line of a poltergeist.

TRACY: Oh, definitely. I’m okay with seeing you, but no touching.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, no touching. That reminds me of a story we had not too long ago, a young woman – I think she was in a dorm or something with roommates, and she’s in bed, she feels this hand on her back, this hand on her head, gripping. I would be screaming. It would be ridiculous. You guys are far braver than I am, because I would be out of there. That’s something else.

Well, Tracy, thank you so much for joining us. Let me ask you: it seems like those experiences haven’t scared you away from the topic of ghosts and the supernatural?

TRACY: Oh, absolutely not. I’ve been hearing ghost stories from my dad since I was a kid, so I’ve always been interested. I don’t think they can do anything to me to scare me way.

JIM HAROLD: Well, there you go. Tracy, thanks for being a part of the Campfire.

TRACY: Thank you so much, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: Nick is on the line, and he was with us last year and told us a doppelganger story. Maybe at the end of this story, he can give us the little update on that one, because there’s been more activity. But first he’s going to tell us – well, I think it’s best to just say this is a headscratcher and let him explain it. Nick, welcome back to the show. Tell us this. This is a pretty neat story.

NICK: Thanks so much, Jim. It’s a pretty short and sweet story. 1996, I was making plans to go and visit India with my then-girlfriend and a good friend of ours to go and visit one of my closest childhood friends who had semi-permanently relocated to India for a bit to live with some of his family after high school.

We were in the process of putting together flights and all of our vaccines and all that crazy stuff, and I would say we were about three weeks out from leaving, and one night I had this dream. I don’t remember anything that preceded the dream, so it wasn’t like it flowed in from another, but all of a sudden I was very, very lucid, very conscious, and there was this woman standing in front of me who looked vaguely like my then-girlfriend.

She started laying into me about how irresponsible this trip was, how I was – what did she call me? – she called me a party boy with no life direction. [laughs] She said all manner of things that I had really no argument for. Here I was, 21 years old, taking this girl and another friend of ours to South Asia. She really let me have it for a number of minutes.

I remember waking up from this dream, and then it was morning and I thought, “That was really weird.” I didn’t really have much defense for a lot of what she said, but I startled chuckling to myself like, “Wow, the things my brain comes up with.”

Later that afternoon, my girlfriend’s phone rings. She picks it up and starts speaking in Icelandic. Her whole family was from Iceland. I hear the conversation get a little heated, and then she comes around the corner and says, “My cousin would like to apologize.” I said, “Whatever do you mean?” She said, “She says that she will not do that to you anymore. I explained to her that that’s extremely rude.”

I’m just standing there listening to this, like, “What are you saying?” Essentially, her cousin got on the phone and apologized to me for invading my dream space.

JIM HAROLD: Whoa.

NICK: Yup. It was a really tense couple of seconds I was on the phone with her, because she was clearly still fuming. I handed the phone back and just sat there, because I hadn’t told anybody about this dream. I just sat there trying to think, what in the world just happened to me?

So we took the trip, everything was fine. In fact, she was the only one who didn’t get sick on the trip. Everybody else on the trip got a head cold or something. So she ended up completely safe. Her cousin I guess didn’t have to worry so much. And the trip concluded, and I actually had occasion to meet this person in person about a year and a half later. We had split up, and I was still good friends with my then-ex-girlfriend and her brother, and I had stopped by their parents’ place to pick them both up because we were going somewhere together, and lo and behold, here is the cousin. She had come in from Iceland.

It was sort of the same experience. She kind of chewed me out for who I was at that point. [laughs] Broke out a deck of tarot cards, demanded that I sit down. At this point I was in no mood. I told her I didn’t think the tarot cards mattered, if she had any talent at all, and she could put them away – which she angrily did, and then went on to bash me for everything I have done wrong since five years old up. There was so much there that she had no reason to know about.  I have no idea. Stuff I never told anybody.

JIM HAROLD: Wow, that had to be a weird feeling.

NICK: Yeah, super weird. I felt like somebody had been peeking in on me in the shower or something for a lifetime. She knew everything. Really let me have it. So that was the last time I saw her, but yeah, I have a really hard time explaining any of that because it was far too accurate.

And meeting her, she looked exactly the way she did in the dream. Just note for note, every single thing about her – her voice, her hair, everything. A lot of open questions there. Not the least of which is the addressing problem. How many people are asleep at any given time? How do you locate that one sleeper? How is that done? Especially being somebody coming from a computer science background, where memory addressing is such a problem and we want to do that efficiently, I think about that. Think about that Dr. Seuss book of how many people are sleeping. It’s true. Hundreds of millions of people are sleeping at any given time; how did she find my dream to get in there and give me a rather lengthy piece of her mind?

JIM HAROLD: Fantastic. What a great story. And that’s not all; we’ve got another little thing for you. Nick, if you don’t mind telling this – Nick called in last year and talked about some incidents of some doppelgangers, but now there’s been an update. Can you maybe briefly tell us what happened before and give us the update?

NICK: Sure. It was about a year and a half ago this started. In short, I interacted with a doppelganger of our son twice, to the point where this echo or whatever it was had said something to me, ducked around the corner of our kitchen, and I went to chase after him to go play – which is a pretty common occurrence around here – and in both instances, nothing there. And then come to find out he was with my wife the first time, out in the backyard, and the second time they were upstairs in his bedroom, reading. He just hadn’t been in here.

And then in between those two incidents, my wife had an interaction with a me, which was really weird because it was at our kitchen island, and she even described what I was wearing. It was the shirt I had on the day before. All this stuff. It was far too accurate. I had gone in there and said, “Hey babe, you got a second to talk?” She said, “Sure.” Put her stuff done, turned around – I was gone. And there I was in the bedroom, and she came in and said, “Why didn’t you stick around to talk?” Actually, I had come out of the bedroom, and she said, “Why didn’t you stick around?”

So that was the first couple incidents. Fast forward to about three weeks ago, we are currently trying to survive a whole main floor remodel. So you get to know your crew pretty well.

JIM HAROLD: Oh yeah. A few years ago we did a kitchen in our old house, and after a while it’s like, “How are you doing, Fred?” You get attached.

NICK: Yeah, we know how everybody takes their coffee, all that. Our project manager was here, and he’s pretty friendly with our son. He’s got a couple sons who are just a little older than ours. He was in the kitchen; he heard our son singing a little song to himself, which is not unusual. He’s a kid who loves music. He ducks around the corner and says, “Hey buddy, what are you singing?” And our son’s not there.

Then my son and I come from the backyard. He just stood there and he said, “Were you not just in here?” We said, “No, we were outside.” He said, “Oh my goodness,” he tells this whole story about “I just listened to your son singing this whole song.” And it’s interesting because our project manager also then launched into all of his tales of the paranormal. They have a very active house, apparently. So I directed him, of course, to the Campfire.

JIM HAROLD: [laughs] That’s the way to do it. See, Nick knows how it works.

NICK: It’s true. We need more callers, we need more listeners. Keep everybody entertained. And also, about a week after that, our son was in the front yard; it was Tuesday or Wednesday, and there really aren’t any other kids in our neighborhood that are close. They’re very large lots. Ours is on just a little over two and a half acres. You don’t hear conversation from other yards.

Our son was right in front of the garage, playing, and next thing you know he comes running in the house, bashes his knee on the doorframe he’s running so fast, and he said, “A little boy said hi to me.” I said, “Really?” We went out front and it was absolutely quiet. Nothing out there but the squirrels and a few deer. And he explained where he was. He said it sounded like a little boy. It wasn’t very loud; it was right in his ear. Said, “Hi!” He said he whipped around and there was nobody there. He looked all around the yard and there was nobody there, so he ran in. So, still having a little bit of the same kind of activity.

JIM HAROLD: Very interesting. Please do keep us updated, and thank you so much for joining us once again, Nick, on the Campfire.

NICK: Thanks so much, Jim.

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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: AJ is on the line from North Carolina. Found out about us from Scott and Forrest over at Astonishing Legends. We appreciate those guys. They’re always holding the banner high for the Campfire, so we’re glad to return the favor.

Now, AJ has got a couple stories for us, and the first one takes us back to his childhood days, when he was at his grandmother’s house. AJ, welcome to the show and please share these stories.

AJ: Hey, Jim. Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here today. Back in the early ’90s, when I was around four or five years old, me and my sister would stay often at my grandparents’. They lived right next door, so we pretty much grew up there. It was always pretty special to us.

If you can picture an old farmhouse with small rooms, an old monitor, oil heater in the living room, one of the old heavy wood-framed TVs, probably from the ’80s or the ’70s, and it always smelled great with my grandmother’s baking or cooking. She’s 95 now, and to this day still the best cook in existence in my book.

Anyway, in her dining room, above the kitchen, there was a painting of an older gentleman in his late seventies, early eighties. This man would’ve been my great-grandfather. He would’ve died in around probably the early ’80s, maybe ’82 or ’82. I wasn’t born until ’88, so I never got a chance to meet him.

Well, when I was over there that day, I was in the living room playing, and I turned around, sensing someone had walked into the room. When I did turn around finally and look, he was just sitting there on the couch. I didn’t know who it was. He said, “Hello, how are you?” to me. I said, “I’m okay, how are you?”, not understanding who I was speaking with. He said, “Hello, AJ.” I was too confused to be scared. It didn’t put me in a state of fright even though I was four or five. He asked what I was doing; I said I was playing with whatever toys I had at the time.

He said, “I’m your Grandpa Ralph who you never got to meet, so I wanted to check in on you. And I want you to know how proud I am of you. I want you to take care of your sister and family.” Of course, being a four- or five-year-old kid, I asked him if he could stick around and play a little bit, because what else are you going to do when you’re four or five and see your grandparent or another family member?

He said, “No, I’m afraid not, but I’ll be watching out for you.” He told me he loved me, patted me on the head, and walked out the screen door that was open, out the screen door onto the porch, and just dissipated. My grandmother came in the room and heard me talking to someone, asked who I was speaking with, and I pointed at the picture on the wall. This picture – it’s a painting with him in a green and white plaid shirt with overalls, sitting in a chair. It was done by someone they knew in the ’70s or ’80s. I pointed at him and said, “It’s Grandpa Ralph, your dad.”

My grandmother is very religious, Southern Baptist, and she probably thought it was utter nonsense, but nonetheless told me that if anyone was ever in the house without her knowing, I need to let her know. And I’ve often wondered if in the back of her mind she thought maybe I was telling the truth and was just glad that I got to meet him, since I never got the chance since he had passed before I was born.

JIM HAROLD: That’s a neat story. I love that story because it reminds me – my grandma had a photograph; it must’ve been one of the very early – I’m considerably older than you, AJ, and it was an older photograph. I remember this from the ’80s, and this photograph must’ve been from the ’20s or something. It sat over their stove, and it was a photograph of my grandmother’s father. And it always scared the hell out of me, to be honest, because he was real dour-looking. He was very young.

It had to be a very early photograph from the ’10s or ’20s, because my grandmother was born in 1899. So this had to be extremely old. I just remember looking at that and it always scared the hell out of me because he looked real – he was younger, he had a mustache, he had a black coat on, a white shirt. I’ll never forget it. I can see it in my mind’s eye right now. It just always scared me. It’s actually nice to see that kind of situation here where the painting didn’t scare you; in this case it was kind of cool.

AJ: Yeah, it was a very neat experience to have his presence there. I haven’t had any more like this, a ghost interaction since then. But it was very interesting nonetheless. I have one more story if we have time.

JIM HAROLD: Yes, certainly. Please go ahead.

AJ: Since I was a kid, I’ve had dreams where I can – I don’t know how to quite put this into words, but see into the future. I don’t know if it’s a precognition or what you would call it, but I have dreams that would come in fragments, sequences over weeks or months, or whole sequences at once.

When I was 11 or 12, we went to 4-H camp in the eastern part of North Carolina. We were going to several places around the eastern part of the state with the group, and my father was part of this group as a chaperone, so he was with me. Prior to this, I kept having a dream where I would fall out of a bunkbed and then I would wake up and these people were all standing around me, including my father.

In about summer of 2000, we were down there and we were at a 4-H camp, and it had bunkhouses with bunkbeds in them. I was a little apprehensive the entire time there, and I couldn’t put my finger on why. The second night we were there, I fell from the top bunk onto the hard wooden floor. My father, who’s 6’8”, had to be on the bottom bunk to sleep because there was no way he was going to fit on the top one. He of course got out of bed, and I’m lying there on the ground. I wasn’t hurt, but I was immediately startled by the fact that I’d had this exact dream with everyone standing around me because I’d fallen out of bed.

Don’t know how to explain that, but that was one of the first times I remembered having I guess you could say déjà vu.

And then recently, my wife and I were on our way home from a little town about 70 miles west of where we live, and as we come out of this little town, on the left-hand side of the road, there was an old mansion that was being done. Had scaffolding out front, workers milling around. I’ve been through this town before, but not since I was a child, so I don’t remember this house at all. But my wife says, “Look, that house is being restored. It’s going to be so beautiful once it’s done.”

I agreed with her, and then it hit me, and I started shaking my head and laughing. She asked what was wrong, and I proceeded to explain to her about the conversation we had just had about this house. I said, “I remember me and you having this conversation.” We’ve been only married about a year and a half, and I had this dream about this house before me and her were even married.

It’s just very odd. I don’t know what you would consider that. It’s definitely a headscratcher to me, because I’ve yet to figure out how I’m able to have these dreams and see things and then them happen in the future.

JIM HAROLD: I’ll tell you, it’s a weird world we live in, and I think reality is far stranger than we give it credit for. And I think stories like this, AJ, prove it. Thank you so much for being a part of the Campfire today. Great stories.

AJ: Yes, sir. Thank you, and thank you for bringing such a great community together to the Campfire. I hope to call in again soon with some more stories.

JIM HAROLD: Jason is on the line from Georgia. He’s been listening for 10 years or so. He and his wife, Drew, are big listeners. So we really appreciate that. As I said, Jason is calling in from Georgia, and he’s going to tell us a story about a very unique hunting trip. Jason, welcome to the show. Thanks for listening, and please tell us what happened.

JASON: Thank you so much, Jim. Yeah, big fan of the show, so I appreciate you having me on. This story took place about 25 years ago or so. I was around 17 years old. It happened on some land that my family owns in Meriwether County, which is middle to middle-west Georgia. My maternal grandmother’s oldest brother inherited hundreds of acres of land. It’s in the middle of nowhere. There is nobody there. It’s a long dirt road to get back there. Nobody else lived on the property.

The property had a lot of history tied to it. I had family members die there, had been murdered on it, they’d distill moonshine and run it off of there, and there was a family cemetery that was also on that land. But in the more modern times, things have calmed down a little bit.

Like I said, this happened in about November of 1997. My cousin and I decided we were going to go deer hunting on that weekend. He was four or five years older than me. When we would go hunting, we would stay up most of the night playing video games the night before, and then of course get up super early and find a good spot to set up.

This particular morning, it was cold. It wasn’t Ohio cold, but for Georgia it was pretty cold. So we were layered up, layers of camo and our vests and our face masks to keep our noses and our ears warm. But I remember it being a really still morning. There was not a lot of breeze. It was very quiet. The road that we traveled on was dirt and gravel, so that was all we heard as we walked out to find a spot.

After a good little hike, we settled on a spot that overlooked the hollow. There was a tree a few yards back, away from where the slope began, and at the bottom of that hollow there was a creek that ran through the whole property. There in that hollow, there were a number of different game trails, so it seemed like it was a perfect place for us to set up. We propped ourselves against the tree, and we waited.

It was nearing daybreak. We were able to see down the hollow, not terribly well, but we could see well enough. As I said, we’d stayed up late playing video games the night before, so I was kind of sleepy. I leaned my head back against the tree and just was relaxing, and I started to doze off – which I know is not the safest thing to do there, but we were on the ground.

But suddenly I heard the sound of something approaching where we were, our spot. There were definite steps through the dried leaves and brush, and it sounded like it was coming behind me to the right. So it was closer to my side. Eddie was to my left. It sounded bigger than a cat or a dog or an animal, and it didn’t sound like it was lumbering anything. It sounded like they were crisp steps.

I nudged Eddie and I was like, “What is that?” He was like, “I don’t know.” I said, “What should we do?” He said, “Take your gun off safety, turn around and” – I’ll never forget he said it this way – “and if it’s something bad, shoot it.”

JIM HAROLD: [laughs] That’s pretty basic.

JASON: Right, exactly. So I did what he said. I took my gun off safety, I jumped up, turned around, and nothing was there. He also got up and looked around, and he didn’t see anything. But what was weird was nothing ran or flew off, so it was kind of strange. We searched the immediate vicinity, but there was nothing that we could tell that had been in our little area there.

So we sat back down, and after another couple minutes, the sound returned. This time it sounded closer, and it moved a little more quickly. Eddie and I looked at each other, realizing this is a thing, so we nodded and then did the same thing. We jumped up, turned around, and the same result. There was nothing there. It blew our minds, like, what in the world is going on? Like I said, there was no wind. We searched the area again; there was no evidence of anything having walked up on us.

We sat back down, and at this point the sun was really starting to crest the hill on the horizon. I remember it being really pretty, this golden orange sunrise. Our visibility is getting better and better by the minute. Like I said, we sat back down, and again, after another few minutes, the crunching and crackling of leaves moved toward me, and again, even more closely than the last time, and even more aggressively than the last time.

It was so close that I could feel what I interpreted as breath on the sliver of my exposed skin between my face mask and my coat.

JIM HAROLD: Oh my.

JASON: Yeah, it still gives me chills to talk about it because it’s the only time – I’ve had a number of different experiences that were strange, but this is the only time I’ve ever felt anything that felt like a physical interaction to my person.

I feel this and I gasp, and I remember almost hyperventilating, saying, “It’s breathing on me, it’s breathing on me!” We did the same thing, except for this time I remember lunging forward, away from the sensation, turning around, and still there was nothing there. Nothing ran off, nothing flew away. We did a quick little investigation, and I decided I did not want to sit there anymore, and we decided we would move to a different location.

So we went to a different location to hunt for the rest of that morning, and then when we got done, we went back to my grandmother’s house. She was cooking breakfast, and we told her what had happened. Sort of matter-of-factly, she was like, “Oh, that was just Betsy trying to play with you.”

JIM HAROLD: Betsy? Who’s Betsy?

JASON: I learned that Betsy was a child who died however long before, hundreds of years prior, and my granny went on to explain that she heard Betsy and the other children all the time when she’d go down to the creek. What I then learned was that that family cemetery where all of my ancestors were buried was just a few hundred yards away from where we were seated at that tree. Also, right there on that hollow – she surmised that the sound carried down into the hollow, and she’d be reading down at the creek and she would hear these kids playing.

We had a number of different experiences there, but that one by far was the one that astounded me the most.

JIM HAROLD: Well, there you have it. Very interesting indeed, Jason. And I love how she said it very matter-of-factly. It’s one of those situations where, honestly – and I’m figuring she’s a feet-on-the-ground kind of person – when they offhandedly mention, “Oh, that’s Betsy,” to me that gives it so much more credibility.

JASON: Absolutely. She had so many experiences. I heard so many things from her and my cousins, and then I experienced a few things up there. I think it was just a way of life for her. Like I said, my family had been on that land for however long, a hundred years or more. I think they just lived with whatever was there, and probably some of them never wanted to leave it.

JIM HAROLD: Well, thank you so much for joining us today. I certainly appreciate it. Thank you for being a part of the Campfire, and we thank Drew as well.

JASON: Thank you so much, Jim. I enjoyed it.

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JIM HAROLD: Next up on the Campfire, a return caller, Christina, is back. You might remember a while back she talked about those haunted castles and places in Europe. Fascinating stuff. And now she has another story for us. Always glad to speak with her. Christina, it just seems like mere moments ago we spoke, but here we are again, and you’re going to share your story. Thank you for joining us, and please tell us what happened.

CHRISTINA: Thanks so much for having me back, Jim. I have a sweeter story this time, not spooky castle stories. My dad’s mom, my Nana, passed away in 2008. She was five-foot-nothing, 90 pounds soaking wet, but she was larger than life. She babysat us growing up. When Nana called the family over for dinner, everyone dropped everything. She was just the matriarch to end all matriarchs.

The whole family was able to be there when she passed. It was the only time that I’ve been around someone as they’re transitioning, and it was really hard because they were super close. As I said, she was just larger than life; we didn’t think anything was ever going to take her out. But I was glad that I got to be there for her in her final moments.

After she passed, I was having a hard time with it, and I had two dreams with her in them. They were different than other dreams. They were more vivid; they were more realistic. I didn’t feel like I was dreaming. I felt like she was really there, and it really helped to give me peace because I felt like she’d gotten where she was going and she was still there with me.

In March 2019, we were going to have a birthday party/family reunion for my Nana’s sister, so my great aunt. Family from all over the country was going to be coming over to my parents’ house, and I was really thinking about the family that we still have and the family that we’ve lost, and I was missing my Nana. I said quietly to myself, “Nana, if you’re still here with me, please give me a sign,” because it had been a while since I’d had any of those dreams with her.

That night, I had a dream. It was nothing; I was just walking to my car in a parking lot, and I sat down in the driver’s seat and I went to put my purse on the passenger seat like I always do, and my Nana was sitting in the passenger seat. It was another one of those movie-quality dreams where she was there and healthy and happy and back to her larger-than-life self.

As soon as I saw her, I panicked and I jumped out of the car and said, “No, no, no, you’re not supposed to be here. You’re dead. You died. You’re not supposed to be” – it just felt so realistic, I reacted like I suppose I would’ve if it was real life. In my dream, she gets out of the car and she walks around to the back where I’m standing, and she, in her sassy way that she had about her, says, “Christina, you asked for a sign that I’m here with you. Now here’s your sign, and this is how you react? I’m here for you and this is what you do?”

I said, “Well, how do I know it’s really you? I know I’m dreaming. How do I know this is really you giving me a sign?” She just smiled and she said, “The family is coming over tomorrow for Franny’s party, right? When they get there, ask them what my dad did for a living. If they tell you he was a cattle farmer, you’ll know it was really me.”

My great-grandparents emigrated from Ireland. My Nana, being first generation, didn’t really want to talk about anything about what happened in Ireland. She was American now. And my dad didn’t really know much because my Nana never really talked about it. So I don’t really know that much about my great-grandfather, and I definitely don’t know if he was a cattle farmer.

The next day, at the party/family reunion, I’m asking everybody, “Does anybody know what Great-Grandpa Murphy did for a living in Ireland?” Nobody knew. The one person that would have known, the person whose birthday party it was, my Aunt Franny, had had a stroke a year before. So she didn’t even really know who anyone was, let alone what her dad did. So I was like, well, it might’ve been Nana, it might not have been. Just filed it away and moved on.

A little while later, my sister and I went to Ireland, and there’s this thing that you can do – a lot of the records in Ireland burnt down in 1920 or something like that, ’22, but you can work with the country and you can hire a genealogist for an hour to help you track down any information that might’ve been lost. So my sister and I did that.

Our great-grandparents’ names were Patrick and Mary, which are, as you can imagine, very common in Ireland. And very common last name as well. This genealogist, bless his heart, was trying his hardest, but he just could not find anything that we thought could have been our grandparents. He said, “You’re my last appointment before lunch; I’m just going to give it five more minutes.”

Five minutes turned into ten, turned into fifteen. He was really, really trying to find something for us. It was almost like a movie, because it was like this last-ditch effort – he found something, and he asked my sister, who’s done some work with our genealogy, so she knows the most about our family. He starts asking her questions that she is able to verify are true. I don’t know how he found it and why that one file that he pulled was the one, but after my sister verified five or six questions, he says, “I think I found your great-grandpa’s war records.”

He pulls it up, turns the screen around so my sister and I can read it. We’re skimming through and she’s like, “Yeah, this is him, this is him.” We look down at the bottom, and Mary is listed as his wife, and towards the bottom of the page it says, “Occupation – farmer: cattle.” I just started sobbing. Farmer I guess is a common occupation in Ireland, but – 

JIM HAROLD: But not cattle farmer.

CHRISTINA: But not cattle farmer. In that moment, I knew what I think I already knew, that my Nana really had come back to me that night, and she’s still with me every day. It was just such a special experience.

JIM HAROLD: As I’ve said on the show many times, I love the spooky stories. Those are great. But I love these kinds of stories just as much because I think it gives us all comfort that our loved ones do live on, and they still stay in touch in different ways, I think. Different for everybody.

CHRISTINA: Definitely.

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

CHRISTINA: Thanks very much, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: Next up on the Campfire is Cara from Louisiana, and we’re so glad to speak with her. She’s been listening to us since 2020, and so glad to have her on the program. She said she grew up in an old house that was actively haunted. She has many, many stories, but that’s another story. She has a favorite story from that house, and it’s actually before she was born. Very interesting. Cara, thank you for joining us today, and tell us your story.

CARA: Thanks, Jim. Like you said, I grew up in an old Dutch colonial in Pearl River, New York that my grandparents bought in the early ’60s, I believe. It was built in 1765, so a lot of history there. This story, my grandmother used to tell me growing up. There were many stories in the house, but this is my absolute favorite.

My grandmother was a teacher. On the weekends, when she was home, she always had an afternoon nap just to recharge. One day, she wakes up and she sees a gentleman standing at the foot of her bed. He’s wearing colonial Revolutionary garb. She looks at him, says, “Hello,” and he nods at her and fizzles away. She explained it like – you know an old TV, how it fades out into gray? She said that’s how he disappeared.

JIM HAROLD: Wow.

CARA: Yes. About two weeks later – and I forgot to mention this before: it was 1976.

JIM HAROLD: Oh, the bicentennial.

CARA: Yes, when this happened. So a few weeks later, she’s reading Time magazine and there is an article about our Founding Fathers. She’s reading the magazine, and we’re in New York, so there’s a bunch of history there. She stumbles upon a painting of a man. She calls for my grandfather to run into the room. He thinks something happened because she’s screaming and freaking out.

My grandfather is not a big believer. He’s a skeptic, even though he lived in this actively haunted house and things happened to him. But the article and the picture that got her going was of Aaron Burr. So she saw Aaron Burr at the foot of her bed.

She wound up doing some research, and I guess the gentleman who built the house – his name was Edward Salyer – actually had Aaron Burr stay with him for a time as his guest. I don’t know, residual haunting, who knows? But that’s definitely my favorite story from growing up in that house.

JIM HAROLD: So essentially, she sees this person in colonial costume, and then reading Time magazine, she basically sees a picture of him. That’s amazing. That is so cool.

CARA: Yes.

JIM HAROLD: It makes sense, especially if he had been there. You said that he lived in the house for a time as the guest of the original owner. I love the fact that you said he nodded.

CARA: He did.

JIM HAROLD: “Good evening.” [laughs]

CARA: He acknowledged her presence, they acknowledged each other, and that was it. [laughs] My grandmother was very much in tune with the other side. She was born in the caul, so she always had a sense for things.

JIM HAROLD: Cool. Very cool. Also, I know that you had another story, a Ouija board story. Please tell us that one as well.

CARA: I did, real quick. My father actually passed away two days before my first birthday. So that was 35 years ago now. But when I was about 11 or 12, I was at my friend Mary’s house, and her mother was really into the occult, and she had a Ouija board. Well, I wanted to contact my father. I got pictures of him, we had a couple of things that were his in the past, and we called upon him. As little 11- or 12-year-old girls, we’re giggling. We’re not being too serious about it.

All of a sudden, the planchette just flies across the board, hangs off the side of the board, and hits the ground, and then the phone rings. This is like ’97, ’98, so it was a landline. Mary’s mom answers the phone, and no one is there. But you could hear somebody on the line, and it was very staticky. Anyway, we think that was him, trying to freak us out and make us laugh, because he apparently was a big jokester.

JIM HAROLD: That’s great. That’s a great one. Cara, thank you so much. I know you heard about us from Christine and Em over at And That’s Why We Drink. They’re so generous and are always mentioning the show, so we thank them. And we thank you for being a part of the Campfire today.

CARA: Thank you so much, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: Next up on the Campfire is Deanne. Deanne wanted to say for sure give a spooky shoutout to Scott, her friend who told her about the Campfire. So Scott, thank you so much for spreading the word. Be like Scott, everybody, and tell your friends about the Campfire. Deanne is calling in today from Georgia, and she’s going to talk to us about – dun-dun-dun! – a haunted cemetery. Deanne, welcome to the show and please tell us what happened. 

DEANNE: Hi, Jim. Thanks for having me on the show.

JIM HAROLD: Thank you.

DEANNE: This was back in 2008-2009. My friend Tara and I on occasion would go on ghost tours. Georgia has a lot of haunted areas, so we would on occasion sign up for these group tours and that. She called me up one day and asked if I wanted to go on this tour at this haunted cemetery with her. I was like, “Yeah, that sounds like fun. Let’s do it.”

We all met – it was a paranormal group that led it, and we met at a Walmart parking lot. It was a bit of a drive. It was at least an hour’s drive away from where we were. But we met with them there, and then when they had the whole group together, we caravanned over to the cemetery. They had to get a permit and everything, so everything was all done on the up-and-up as far as the tour goes.

We went there and we walked around. There was a lot of old tombstones and graves and everything, and they told us, “You’re going to probably feel and experience things. You’ll feel like spiderwebs may be on your face, or you may get your hair tugged or you may get poked.” And sure enough, along the way people were experiencing all of those things.

They said there’s a giant orb that people capture in their pictures, and it’s supposedly something that watches over the cemetery. I don’t know if it’s more watching over or more keeping things there, captive. I’m not sure. But I took some pictures, and sure enough, I had it. It looks exactly like a big full moon in the sky, but it’s not because the moon was off in a different direction. So there really is something. But there were lots of orbs captured that night, and people were experiencing all these things.

They had this walkway that went down to a lower portion of the cemetery, so I was walking and talking with somebody in the paranormal group, and she was a sensitive. We were talking, and I started to head down the pathway, and she stopped real short. I said, “Oh, aren’t you going down there?” She said, “No, I don’t go down there.” I said, “Why?” She said, “I don’t like it down there. It’s very dark. I don’t like the energy. I don’t go down there.” I said, “Oh, okay.”

I walked down, and there were just a few headstones down there. It was not a lot. But I noticed as soon as I got down there, big temperature change. If you’ve ever stood by the side of a creek in a wooded area and you feel that coolness that comes right off – it was that kind of thing, but there was no water in the area. It was just complete temperature change. I even commented on it. I was like, “Gosh, it’s a lot cooler down here.” And it was not that big a difference in elevation.

I went around and was taking pictures of the headstones, and then when I had seen my pictures later, there was one in particular that had a lot of swooshy – I don’t know if it was ectoplasm or what it was that was captured in front of it. There was no fog that night. Nobody was smoking. It wasn’t anything like that. And I did a click, click, click, so it’s like it’s not there, it’s starting to appear, it’s there, and then it’s gone. So there was some sort of activity there.

The guy that was heading up the group said, “Hey, let’s all sit down in a circle down here on the path and let’s see if we can contact somebody.” So we all sat around, and he’s sitting there and he’s saying, “If there’s anybody here, let yourself be known.” There’s nothing. He kept egging on, and we hear nothing. There’s nothing outside going on, no sounds or anything. He says again, “If there’s something there, let yourself be known.” All you can hear is a dog, a single dog way off in the distance. That’s the only thing we could hear. Nothing’s happening.

So he’s like, “Use my energy. Use me. Use my energy.” He’s saying this and I’m thinking, that is not a good thing to do. You’re just inviting something to come into you. So I was like, I don’t like where he’s going with this. I think he might regret this. He kept egging it on, saying, “Come on, we’re here. We want to connect with you. We want to communicate. Use my energy.”

Now we’re hearing a couple more dogs barking, and he continues to try to connect with something. And now we’re hearing more dogs, and it sounds like there’s a bigger group. And now they’re getting louder, and they’re getting closer. Suddenly, at some point, after trying to connect – the only thing we’re hearing are these dogs – he says, “You know what? I don’t think we’re going to connect with anything. Why don’t we head up the path?”

That’s when I said, “Did you hear all those dogs?” Somebody said, “Yeah, and they were getting closer.” I was thinking, yeah, I was thinking the same thing. They clearly were getting closer. It sounded like a pack of dogs. It started as a single dog. Anyway, as soon as he broke off communication, all the dog barking instantly stopped. It just completely went away.

We went up the path, and right then it started to drizzle rain, so they’re like, “I think we’d better call it a night.” My friend and I got in our car, and they stopped us on the way out and gave us some sage. They’re like, “Burn this in your car.” They told us something along the lines of saying, “You have to stay here. You can’t go with us.” They told us something to say over and over again while burning the sage until we got out of the cemetery, because of course, neither one of us wanted to bring anything extra home with us.

So we got out of there, and the next day he called everybody and followed up, and he said, “I don’t know what you thought of it and how it was. I’m so sorry we had to cut it short because of the rain.” I said, “No, it was fine. We got a good bit of time in.” He said, “I’ll give you a refund if you want.” I’m like, “No, not necessary. It was good. It was fine.” He said, “What’d you think of it?” I said, “A lot of interesting things. I captured some good pictures and stuff. But that thing with the dogs was really strange.”

And he said, “What nobody knows is at that time, when I kept asking for something to show itself, something took me over. And it got into my head and was showing me things that are so dark, so disturbing, I can’t even talk about it. I can’t even tell you what I saw. I haven’t even told anybody on my team what I saw. I cannot even talk about it. It was that bad. That’s the real reason I cut things off when I did, because something really dark was there.” I said, “Oh, wow, that’s crazy.”

Anyway, about a year or two later – I was an office manager in a small five-person office, and every quarter a person comes in to spray for the bugs, pest control. So he came in. Every quarter it’s a different person. I didn’t recognize him on sight because it had been a little while, and it was nighttime when I had seen him. But somehow the conversation came up – and I don’t recall how it came up, about what he did on the side – and I said, “Oh, my friend and I went on one.” Somehow, through our conversation, we realized that I went on his ghost tour.

I said, “Yeah, that was the night all the dogs were barking, you were trying to connect with something.” He goes, “Oh, I know exactly the night you’re talking about. To this day, that was the most terrifying experience for me that I’ve ever had.” This is somebody that does this all the time, but he said it was just absolutely terrifying.

But I was like, what are the odds? As far away as that was, he comes into this little five-person office and we talked about it and he instantly remembered the night I was talking about.

JIM HAROLD: It’s one of those things – what’s wild is the idea that there were these hellhounds. You went on a tour of a haunted cemetery and you’re confronting hellhounds. That’s frightening.

DEANNE: Yeah, it is. I thought I was the only one sitting there hearing, like, “There’s more and more of them.” You could tell they were growing in numbers and that they were getting really close. But come to find out there were other people that were keyed up to that too. But the fact that as soon as he stopped, it all stopped, all the dogs instantly, just like that – they were gone.

JIM HAROLD: Wow. My goodness. Thank you again so much for being a part of the Campfire and sharing this very frightening story.

DEANNE: Yeah, definitely one for the books, one to remember. Thank you so much. I enjoy your show so much. Of course, I’ll keep listening and keep spreading the word.

JIM HAROLD: Camille is on the line. She actually found us in a unique way, and it gives me a chance to briefly talk about one of my all-time favorite guests and authors, the late great Rosemary Ellen Guiley. Camille said she was a big fan of Rosemary’s, went googling, and found some podcasts that Rosemary was on which I hosted. She was a guest many times on our shows. I think it was 20 times. So if you’re interested in the paranormal, look up Rosemary Ellen Guiley. You will get an education from her books. Great author, and she is very, very missed.

Camille is on the line today from Quebec, Canada – love to hear from our friends up north – she’s going to tell us about something that happened in her teenage years. Camille, welcome to the show and thank you for joining us. Tell us what happened.

CAMILLE: This happened about 2006. I was a teenager back then. We’d just moved to a house, and it was weird because my parents were moving to Dubai, and they sold their house and they moved to the house that was just in front of the house that they sold. It was always a creepy house, but I was always a scaredy-cat, so that’s that.

We were picking our room, and I chose the room that was on the last floor. It was a weird floor. When you go up the stairs, on the right there’s a big bedroom, in front of the hallway there’s a bathroom, and on the left, it was this closed-off, weird attic with weird posters. It was an awkward attic and an awkward floor, but for a teenager like me it was kind of fun to have a whole floor to myself, so I chose that bedroom.

It was about two or three months, and I was in my bedroom, and the whole attic was creepy. No one ever went there. I always wondered why I chose the bedroom, but it is what it is. I was in my bed, and I had my TV and I was watching Whose Line Is It Anyway.

JIM HAROLD: I love that show.

CAMILLE: Yeah, I remember that clearly because I needed to laugh because the whole evening was creepy. So I really needed that. And there was no one home, not my parents and not my sister.

So I was watching Whose Line Is It Anyway on my TV. I had my laptop, and I was on MSN talking to all of my friends, and I had a touch lamp. The touch lamp has three light levels: low, medium, high, and then obviously the fourth one is off. Anyway, I was watching Whose Line, having a great Friday night, and all of a sudden, all my electronics from the floor shut down. Then it went back up. I was like “Old house electronics.” I was trying to not get myself too scared. I put the sound louder.

Everything was good for the next five minutes, and then all of a sudden my lamp that is now on Level 1, because I never put it higher after the first shutdown, went one, two, three, and at the fourth one, everything shut down – my TV, my plugged in laptop, and my lamp. And then it went back up, just to Level 1. I said, “Okay, very weird, but it is what it is. I’ll just move on.”

Five minutes later, one, two, three, four, all of it shuts down. And then when it went back up, there was this creepy, shadow, faceless, darker than black man on my bed, crawling towards me. Then everything went black, the lights went back up, and he was gone. Afterwards, I realized that my laptop had tis full battery, so it couldn’t have just –

JIM HAROLD: Right, it wasn’t just electricity because it would’ve gone over to the battery.

CAMILLE: Exactly, and the touch lamp, if you put it on and off, it just goes off, on, off, on. It doesn’t do one, two, three, off when you plug it out. I never could explain that.

JIM HAROLD: It wasn’t just a simple power outage from an older house. It was something else. And then you saw this – what sounded like a shadow person to me.

CAMILLE: And he was so angry at me. I was more scared of his anger towards me at first than the actual shadow person. It was the weirdest thing. It was like it was angry I was there alive, or it just wanted me out of there. I was like, “Oh my God,” and then I realized it was a ghost or a shadow person – I realized that three minutes later, I think.

JIM HAROLD: I’ve got to tell you, it does make you think. I’ve always been fascinated with stories where entities will mess with electronics. We had one story – and this is years ago, very early on the show. A woman worked at a funeral parlor, and there was a bunch of weird stuff going on. I can’t remember everything. But the one thing that stood out for me is either a light turned on by itself or she turned on the light – I think it turned on by itself but the light was not plugged into the electrical receptacle. That one will make you think.

CAMILLE: Yeah.

JIM HAROLD: Well, Camille, thank you so much. I appreciate it, and thank you for being a part of the Campfire today.

CAMILLE: Thank you.

JIM HAROLD: Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of the Campfire. I certainly appreciate it. Thanks to all the storytellers, all of our great sponsors, our Plus Club members (you can check that out over at jimharoldplus.com), and thank you for listening. We appreciate it. I hope you have a great week. Stay safe and, as always, of course, stay spooky. Bye-bye, everybody.

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.