A haunted bed, a haunted hotel, a haunted music box, and a story involving serial killer Ted Bundy are just part of this all-new Campfire. Enjoy!
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JIM HAROLD: Imagine having a haunted bed – up next on the Campfire.
Welcome to our gathering tonight. Here we share stories of ordinary people who have experienced extraordinary things. Sit back, relax, and warm yourself by Jim Harold’s Campfire.
JIM HAROLD: Welcome to the Campfire. I am Jim Harold. So glad to be with you once again, and we have a great show for you indeed. Campfire is the show where you’ll find true stories of the strange – UFOs, ghosts, cryptid creatures, it’s all part of what we do here, and I hope that you do enjoy it. Welcome aboard.
Also, before we get started with the show, and we will momentarily, I wanted to tell you about another podcast. We’ve rolled out Season 3, but there’s a wrinkle, there’s something new. Unpleasant Dreams is back for its third season, but there’s a difference: we’re going to be doing classic fictional spooky stories. In the past we talked about paranormal cases and things; this will be actual dramatic readings of spooky stories. Cassandra is still the host, so she’s still heading it up. This last week she did “The Monkey’s Paw,” and I just thought it was awesome. I think you’ll enjoy it. So if you like fictional spooky stories, unlike the ones you hear here, but you like spooky stuff, subscribe, follow, check out Unpleasant Dreams. You can find it on all the major podcatchers. Unpleasant Dreams. And I hope you do check it out.
And next, let’s check out this great Campfire story.
Jess is on the line from North Carolina, and she has outlined for me one of the most terrifying things I could possibly think of, and she’s going to tell us about it. She’s been listening for about a year. She said she started out kind of skeptically, but this experience and this series of experiences may have changed her mind. Jess, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us, and please tell us what happened.
JESS: Absolutely. Thank you for having me, Jim. I so appreciate your podcast and everything you do. This experience started happening to me about seven years ago. My husband, at that time fiancé, and I lived in a small cabin. I had several experiences where I would wake up because the bed was shaking, and then I felt I had a pressure on top of my chest. The first few times this happened, I dismissed it as somewhat of a dream or whatnot because I was fully asleep. I just wrote it off and hadn’t thought about it. Then we moved to a second location, where it ended up happening a few more times there.
Then I had actually a break from this when I was pregnant. I had Irish twins, so I was pregnant back to back, and either it was happening and I was so tired I wasn’t registering it, or it stopped happening. But about I’d say six months postpartum, it started happening again, and at this point it started and has now increased in frequency, to the point now that every time I’m in this bed, whether it’s day or night, I feel this movement.
When I’m alone, I can feel a bouncing starting on the side of my husband, and then I can feel the springs compress as if someone is sliding on the bed over to my side next to me, and then I can feel a pressure on my body. I don’t really know what to say about this. It’s just kind of a crazy thing. My husband and I are not traditional believers with this; I’ve never really had an experience like this before. When I first told him, he was very skeptical and he thought maybe it was the springs in the mattress.
He has since started feeling it because the frequency has increased. He has also been kicked on multiple occasions by whatever this is.
I have tried to do everything I could think of. I have bought tourmaline, I have put magnets on the side of my bed, I have smudged my house with the rue herb, I have bought holy water and washed my sheets in it and sprayed it on my bed – all the things, and it is still persistent and is active as of last night. [laughs] So I’m not really sure what to do with this.
JIM HAROLD: Wow. I don’t know. I know you said you’ve not been listening too long, about a year. I’ve never said that I’m an expert; I’m not the person you go to for the prescription on how to solve this. But I will say this. We’ve had kind of similar stories. Not as intense as what you’re – or at least not as frequent.
Now, there was – I believe it might’ve been Julie from Germany a few years ago who called in. Her husband was in the Air Force in Germany. They were stationed there. One morning, she woke up and it was her perception that her husband was spooning her, which was very unusual for him; it wasn’t something he did. And then I think she said she felt like a pressure, like a grip, gripping her arm, and she turned around and it was her husband, but it wasn’t her husband. It was like a slightly off version of her husband. Then she looked at the clock and realized, “Oh, it can’t be my husband. He’s out for his daily jog.” The thing was, she said something to it like, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus!”, I think is what she said that she said. And the thing said, “Don’t say that.”
JESS: Ooh.
JIM HAROLD: Then she had things happen a few other times. So that’s the one that it reminds me the most of, but I don’t know she had the frequency of this. Jeez.
JESS: I have said the Lord’s Prayer when this is going on. That didn’t seem to do anything. I don’t know, this is wild to me that this is happening and that it’s such a frequent thing. I don’t know if we just need to buy a new bed. Perhaps the bed is haunted. I will say in that first house we lived in, we found out from a neighbor that there was someone who passed in that house. I don’t know if she was mad that at the time I was living with my husband and we weren’t married yet. I don’t know. That’s the only thing I can really think of.
And I will say what actually opened us up entirely to this whole thing is my dog could see her, and he would move around to avoid her in the kitchen. We were told by the neighbor the kitchen is where she passed. Now this particular dog has passed away a few months before this started really amping up, so perhaps – I don’t know, maybe he was protecting us from whatever this was or keeping it at bay, and now that he’s no longer here – I have no idea. But it’s something very odd that I never thought I’d experience in my life.
JIM HAROLD: Again, I don’t like to give prescriptions for these sorts of things because I am not an expert; I’m just someone who asks questions, hears stories. On my other shows I interview people who know a lot more about this than me. But it would seem logical – to me, the next logical step would be maybe to try a different bed. Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s the bed itself.
JESS: I think that’s where we’re at, at this point. We both work full-time. We have little children. We value our sleep very much, so the fact that this is a continuing thing – and I’ve heard some of your callers say it happened at the witching hour and whatnot. This will happen even if I am fortunate enough to get a nap after work, like say I have someone watching the children and they say, “Go take a nap for an hour.” This happened yesterday at a nap at like 4:30 in the afternoon. And I never see anything. Even at night when it happens, I’ve shone my flashlight, I’ve turned on lights – I never see anything, which I’m thankful that I’m not seeing anything, but it is persistent. Every time I’m in that bed, I feel something.
JIM HAROLD: Whew. Wow, that’s spooky, because that’s where you go to say, “Okay, I’m going to let my guard down. I’m going to relax, I’m going to rest, I’m going to recharge.” And then if it’s haunted, where do you go? That’s a tough one. Well Jess, I wish you the best. I hope you get this figured out. Please keep us updated, and I wish you and your husband the best with this.
JESS: Thank you so much, Jim. I appreciate your time today. Thank you for talking to me. If any of your listeners have advice, I’d appreciate it. I am in your Facebook group as well. So yeah, hopefully we can get this resolved. I think you’re right; I think the next step is to just get a new bed.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah. The Virtual Campfire Group, by the way, Jess is referring to – that’s at virtualcampfiregroup.com, and it auto-forwards you over to the Facebook group. Jess, thanks again, and all the best. Hopefully this’ll calm down for you.
JESS: Thank you so much, Jim. I appreciate it.
JIM HAROLD: Next up on the Campfire is Renee from Florida. This story could be disturbing for some folks because it involves really a very sinister person, Ted Bundy. Of course, we know he was a serial murderer. Renee, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us. I appreciate it, and please let us know what happened.
RENEE: Hey there, Jim. I went to school – I graduated Florida State University in the early 2000s in Tallahassee, Florida. My house was just a few doors down from the Chi O house, the sorority house where Ted Bundy had murdered two girls and attacked several others. There’s always that cloud hanging over the campus. It’s just something that’s always in the back of your mind, especially if you’re walking to class and you walk by it or you’re walking from class and you walk by the house.
One of my roommates had just broken up from a longtime boyfriend, and she had a date with a guy in her class. She was really excited. We’re all being typical girls, we’re all looking out the windows when he comes to pick her up, want to see what he looks like, see what’s going on, you know. [laughs] And I gasped and fell backwards off the bed. My one friend’s laughing and she’s like, “Oh, you thought he was so cute?” I’m like, “No, that’s not it.” I was speechless.
So he comes and he picks her up and they go off, and my friend is like, “What’s going on? You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Your face is white.” I told her, “You didn’t see that?” She said, “What do you mean?” I said, “That guy looked just like Ted Bundy.” She starts laughing and she’s like, “No, he didn’t.” I’m like, “How is that even funny? He did. He looked just like him.” It was like his face was just like the pictures you would see of him. Handsome, good-looking guy, clean cut.
But then when I fell off the bed, there was a point where his face kind of shifted into – it was almost like Jack Nicholson’s face in The Shining. Like that leering, gleeful, “I’m about to do something horrible” look. And that was at the point that I gasped and fell off the bed. I don’t know if the visage switched back or what, and maybe I would’ve then seen that it wasn’t actually Ted Bundy. But I don’t know.
So all night, I’m calling, I’m texting my friend. I was getting very upset. This is back when texts, the buttons, you had to hit the numbers. If you wanted the letter “C,” you had to hit the “1” three times, the letter “A,” one. So it took a few minutes to text someone. But I was getting more and more and more upset, to the point where our other friends, my other roommates, started calling and texting her as well.
We ruined her date. [laughs] I’m sorry. We ruined her date. She came home, she was absolutely furious. The guy was pulling out all the stops. He had sprung for a whole bottle of wine, flowers, the whole deal. He was just being so suave, so charming, just absolutely wonderful, trying to impress her. So she was furious with me. When I explained to her what I had seen, she thought I was nuts. She thought I was imagining things, that I was crazy. She accused me of being jealous. It wasn’t a very good encounter with my friend. She didn’t speak to me for a week. It was straight-up silent treatment.
In fact, all of my friends just thought I was crazy. It was a very quiet week. I spent a lot of time at the library avoiding everybody. I thought I was crazy.
Until she came home from class and walked in and gave me a huge hug. I was like, “What’s going on? You haven’t talked to me in a week. I’ve been like pariah.” She told me that the guy that she had been on a date with had been arrested for assaulting several women.
JIM HAROLD: Wow. Wow.
RENEE: Yeah.
JIM HAROLD: Let me throw this out here, and then I want to get your feelings on it, of course, too. Do you think maybe someone or something was trying to clue you in that this person was bad news and presented it in an image that would immediately be understandable? In other words, you know Ted Bundy is bad. You know Ted Bundy is a murderer of women. I’m not saying this person was a murderer; this person at least was abusive, though, which is bad enough. So what I’m saying is, do you think it was the Universe or God or whoever it is trying to tell you in a way that you would immediately get? What are your thoughts?
RENEE: I don’t know. I’ve thought about that over the years. I’ve also thought – one of my friends, when we did talk about it afterwards – God knows we haven’t talked about it; it’s been 20 years and we haven’t talked about it since. But we almost wondered at one point if maybe it was his spirit possessing him. That was one of the theories that one of my friends threw out there, and that I just happened to see it. One of my roommates was a criminal justice major, and she did a lot of study of Ted Bundy, especially because the murders that occurred in Florida at the Chi O house were unlike any of his previous crimes. They were just frantic, like he was in a homicidal rage.
When I told her that it was like The Shining, that his face looked like that, she was like, “Maybe it was some sort of – something horrible, or it could’ve just been that this was a horrible person naturally.” I don’t know. It was certainly something I’ve never forgotten, and I know that all the rest of us, as we’ve gone about our ways in life, we’ve never forgotten even though we don’t talk about it. But yeah, it was terrifying.
JIM HAROLD: Things work in a very strange way. But you knew. You knew this guy was bad news, and it was confirmed. Very interesting. Always something new on the Campfire. I was telling somebody the other day, I’ve been doing this show since 2009, and I think in April it will be 14 years, and there’s always a new wrinkle and a new kind of story. Renee, thank you so much for sharing yours.
RENEE: Thank you.
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JIM HAROLD: Up next on the Campfire is Brian from Michigan, and ooh, this looks like a good one. He has a story about the haunted music box. He’s been listening for about a year. We appreciate it. Brian, you’ve got me interested. I want to hear all about this. Thank you for joining us on the Campfire and tell us what happened.
BRIAN: I’ll give a brief setup. When I was about seven or eight years old, my father had fallen off of a roof and he hurt his hip. He had to have full hip replacement surgery at about 35 years old.
JIM HAROLD: Oh my.
BRIAN: But he got a job with a company that offered to train him if he went to a special school in Oregon for drafting. So we went down there, and while we were there, with myself being about seven or eight years old and my brother a year younger, my parents said, “Hey, we’re never going to be this close to Disneyland and Universal Studios; why don’t we go down there?”
My mom really likes Humphrey Bogart and the movie Casablanca. I did a little bit of research on this, and as near as I can figure, my dad must’ve bought this music box when we were at Universal Studios. It was a music box that had a picture of Humphrey Bogart on it and a disc that would spin so it looked like he was smoking a cigarette and he would wink. But it was also a coin sorter, so you’d drop in pennies and dimes and it would sort it for you. My brother and I always thought that was cool because we didn’t know how it knew where to put what.
Fast forward about 12 years, and my mother is watching a television show. I’m about 19 and my brother is about 18. I’m lying on the floor reading a book and he’s sitting on the couch doing something, and my mom is really invested in this. It was one of those new shows – I can’t remember what it was, something like 60 Minutes or 20/20. If you remember, they had a lot of those in the late ’90s. So she’s really invested in this because one of the producers had passed away, and his favorite movie was Casablanca and his favorite song was “As Time Goes By.”
So she is watching this and it’s going through the whole thing, and they say something at the end of it – I can’t remember exactly what it was, but something like “We’ll see you again soon” or “Here’s looking at you, kid,” from the movie. Bogart ends the show with winking at the camera and it’s playing “As Time Goes By.”
Right when that happens, we hear this strange noise from my parents’ bedroom. It’s kind of this whirring, mechanical sound, and we can’t figure out what it is. I could tell my mom was getting a little nervous, and I look at my brother and his mouth is open. He’s like, “What is that?” We didn’t know if the refrigerator was dying or what was going on. We’re listening to it and there’s nothing really intelligible in it. I’m walking around the house and I said, “Mom, it’s coming from your bedroom.” She said, “No, that can’t be.”
I walk in there and it’s this music box. It’s spinning, and it’s just making these really strange mechanical sounds. Again, there’s no music coming out of it. It’s just this rrrrrrrrr, rrrrrrrrrr. And when I walk in and I look at it, it kind of plays the end of the song, like… [sings a few notes]… and stops. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: Wow. That is weird.
BRIAN: I pick up this music box and I bring it out to my mom and I say, “This was playing.” She goes, “No, I haven’t looked at that in years.” It was probably purchased in 1985, from what I can guess. I did some searching on eBay just because I was researching what had happened, trying to jog my memory, and people are still selling these on eBay. They say it was a limited run, and probably made for Universal Studios to sell to tourists.
I open up the back compartment and there’s no batteries in it. I said, “Mom, there’s no batteries.” She starts nervously laughing and she says, “No, no, no, that can’t be.” I said, “Absolutely, there’s nothing in here.” The compartment that holds the batteries was kind of corroded, even. I put a coin in it and it didn’t play any songs. It just kind of spun, but it was just the mechanics working. There was nothing digital that was working. So I put new batteries in it, and I’m telling you, this music box never played again.
JIM HAROLD: That is weird.
BRIAN: I asked my mom about it about 10 years later, and I said, “Hey Mom, do you remember that weird thing at happened with the music box?” She said, “Nope, I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t even want to think about it.” I think she threw it away, it freaked her out so bad.
JIM HAROLD: What I’m wondering is – just go with me and see if this makes sense; it’s kind of out there. What if your mom, watching that, had the same kind of energy and emotional investment that she did when she first saw that music box, and somehow her energy caused that music box to go off?
BRIAN: I don’t know. At first when something happens to you and you write it from your perspective or you remember it from your perspective, you think it’s about you. But the more I’ve thought about it, I do think it was about my mom, because that was her favorite. The other thing my dad had bought her was this t-shirt with Humphrey Bogart’s face on it, and I always hated it because they kept it in the basement and it creeped me out. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: [laughs] I could see that.
BRIAN: But she loves Humphrey Bogart, she loves that movie, and from my perspective, at 18-19, I thought, “Oh, this is just some weird old black-and-white movie” – in the meantime, I actually have enjoyed it myself. It’s a fantastic movie, and I like The Maltese Falcon. I didn’t appreciate it back then. But the more I think about it, I think that was a story about my mom, not about me. You’re right.
JIM HAROLD: It’s so cool. Well, Brian, thank you so much for sharing it. And if your mom’s listening to this, I’ve got one thing to say: Here’s looking at you, kid.
BRIAN: That’s right. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: Thanks, Brian.
BRIAN: Thank you.
JIM HAROLD: Next up, we have a fellow podcaster. We have Joel from Lets Read and he’s going to tell us – well, a very spooky story. Joel, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us around the Campfire. Please tell us this story. I know this is one from one of your listeners, but pretty remarkable.
JOEL: Yeah, absolutely. Here it goes:
“As a kid, I lived with my grandparents for a while, and let me tell you, my grandfather was not a friendly guy. He was a World War II vet who enlisted in the Air Force after returning from the Pacific. He didn’t even come home to his family for several years. Family lore goes that the war had messed him up in the head; he was injured pretty badly, and he needed time to heal back to himself before coming home.
“He may have healed, but he never returned back to himself. He was always saying that the end of the world was right around the corner with all the recent wars in the Middle East, the gasoline rationing, Watergate, the Kennedys, etc. He didn’t trust anyone and was sure the banks were going to fail, the Russians were going to invade, race riots were coming again. This theories changed weekly. He always warned me that ‘they’ would be trying to come and get our stuff someday soon, so we had to be ready. We had shelves of food, water, generators, fuel, gold bars, firearms and ammo. You know, the usual.
“I was 9 or 10 at the time, and this would’ve been about 1972 or 1973. We were living in a small cabin on a ridge looking over the Maumee River in Northeast Ohio for the summer. This was his weekend getaway, primarily. There were very few neighbors for miles, and the ones that were nearby were mostly weekenders. The nearest small town was about 10 miles away, and the hospitals were even further away.
“There was a two-lane highway on the opposite side of the cabin with nice views of the river that was pretty much a straight road with slow curves every 10 miles or so. About a half mile down the road, though, there was a crazy sharp curve that terminated at a small bridge over a creek. There were several accidents there every year, some with fatal injuries. We could often hear the crashes. Sometimes I’d wander down there the next morning to look at the scene and wonder if the drivers were okay.
“One warm summer night, we were awakened by a pounding on the front door. My room was right next to the door and my grandfather’s was down the hallway a bit. I remember getting out of bed and having him hand me a shotgun while he held a 1911 as he looked through the window to see who it was. I had never recalled anyone stopping by before, especially in the middle of the night. The cabin was elevated with a storm shelter underneath, so there were four steps leading up to the door. We had one of those old yellow security lights in the yard, and things always looked kind of hazy and weird at night because of that.
“I looked out the window next to him and saw a man and a woman on the lower step to the door. They must’ve knocked and then stepped back down to appear less threatening. It was a good call because he opened the door a bit while openly displaying and keeping his pistol pointed at them. The woman exploded in crying, blabbering, and a screaming wail all at once. She said there was a terrible accident that just happened down at the curves, and please call an ambulance. She said there were other people who were seriously hurt and they needed help, and asked if we could come to help them too.
“Now, this man hated hippies more than anyone else, and these two might just have qualified. She had on ripped jeans, one of those suede leather-fringed jackets, and the guy looked like he had a biker vest on. She did have what looked like blood in her hair and was not making much sense at all. What was really weird was the guy wasn’t saying anything. He was just standing off the porch, listening to her go off. I assumed that he was intimidated by the .45 pointing at him and didn’t want to antagonize the old man with the crew cut holding it.
“My grandfather was sure they were stoned and kept telling the girl to calm down, but she wouldn’t, and they got into a screaming match between them, ending with him telling her to get the hell off of his property or he would shoot them both. We were both outside watching them head back to the road, and I noticed the guy wasn’t even wearing any shoes. As I didn’t hear a crash and they were so weird, I really didn’t know what to think.
“We went back inside and my grandfather sat me down and explained his theory to me. They were making the story up. They were most likely drug addicts who were looking for poor suckers to rob or maybe even kill. Unfortunately, it was not that crazy of a theory, as at the time, the Manson family murders had just happened less than four years ago. I recalled the Manson story had held my grandfather’s interest for some time. I asked him, ‘What about the blood in her hair?’ He stated it was fake, trying to gain our trust, entrance into our cabin. I thought we could just call the state police to be safe, but he wasn’t fond of inviting cops into his world either, so we just went back to bed.
“As soon as I woke up, I was still curious, but I didn’t walk down to the bridge and the curve this time. Later in the morning, several police cars and pickups began arriving and parking off to the side of the road down there. I couldn’t resist going down to check it out. My grandmother went with me, as my grandfather was still at work. An ambulance was departing as we arrived at the location, and we soon saw the evidence of an accident the previous evening.
“There was a small guardrail, bits of metal, glass, and a tree off the road with a deep gouge and a bunch of bark missing. A mangled motorcycle was down in the ditch, and several people were searching around in the heavily wooded creek area. We overheard that at least one man was dead, and his girlfriend was found a half a mile down the road in really bad shape, was in critical condition after being found by a passing motorist. It was a simple motorcycle that had lost control, as far as I understood.
“One woman was sobbing to the troopers, asking if they had found the boots yet. It turns out her son was the motorcyclist who wrecked, and I guess the impact threw him out of the new boots that she said he had purchased. She also said that he didn’t even wear a helmet, and she wish he would have. The cop, trying to console her, told her he didn’t suffer, as he was almost assuredly killed instantly when he hit the tree.
“I think my heart nearly jumped out of my chest, and I’ve never felt so cold in my life when I started connecting the dots. We walked back home without giving any of the people there any information. I don’t remember even speaking to any of them. I was in a daze. I was freaked out for days. I didn’t want to connect those dots anymore, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Who the hell did the girl want us to go help?
“I heard my grandparents discussing it only once, later that night, coming up with a story to help them sleep at night. They decided the guy wasn’t killed in the crash, that he somehow died later, mostly from – and I quote – ‘all the drugs that he and his girlfriend were all hopped up on,’ and that the girl was just fine. We never mentioned it again, but we didn’t spend as much time at that vacation area as we had before.”
JIM HAROLD: Well, that is quite a story. On Campfire we’ve had similar stories where people have felt that they interfaced with ghosts after a car crash or those kind of things, so it fits from what we hear over here. But you hear an awful lot of stories over at your podcast, so why don’t you give people a minute or two about the show, what it is, and where people can find it, Joel?
JOEL: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. It’s called The Lets Read Podcast, and we’re on all the major podcast platforms and also YouTube as well. Basically, users and subscribers send in true scary stories of things they experienced – anything from interactions with a crazy stalker, experiences they’ve had in the past to stories such as these that have a paranormal element to it. It’s one of my favorite things to do, just get into the mind and experiences of other people. This story in particular is very strange because it takes some time to piece together, but it really does make you wonder who that guy was standing in the background with the girl.
JIM HAROLD: I believe these things are real. I’ve had too many people tell me the stories over the years. Joel, one more time, the name of the podcast and where people can find it?
JOEL: Absolutely. It’s The Lets Read Podcast, and you can find that on any podcast platform as well as Lets Read on YouTube, where all the new stuff goes up. Thanks for having me.
JIM HAROLD: And thank you for being a part of the Campfire.
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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: Sarah is on the line from South Carolina. She was on the show not that long ago, and glad to have her back. And this story is about a very beloved pet. Sarah, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us and for sharing this story.
SARAH: Thank you so much, Jim, for having me back. What happened is in October of 2021, the first Saturday of October, our Taffy died suddenly.
JIM HAROLD: Aw, I’m sorry.
SARAH: Unfortunately, it was about three weeks before his 15th birthday. We were absolutely not prepared for it. It came out of the blue. After we left the vet’s office – it happened early in the morning, so we left the vet’s office, and I remember during home and just praying, “Taffy, will you send us a rainbow and let us know that you crossed the rainbow bridge, made it to heaven?” That night, we went out to eat and were having a picnic, and we looked up in the sky and my mom goes, “Sarah, there’s a rainbow.”
JIM HAROLD: Aww.
SARAH: I took it to mean that Taffy was letting us know he made it.
JIM HAROLD: And Taffy was a dog.
SARAH: Taffy was a dog, correct.
JIM HAROLD: What kind of dog was he?
SARAH: He was a very large chihuahua. We were told he was a chihuahua. He was about 17 pounds, and Jim, I kid you not, we do day trips every weekend, and everywhere we went for about two months after, every Saturday, we had a rainbow from Taffy. Even today, if I see a rainbow and it’s on a Saturday, I’m like, “Hi Taffy. Thank you.”
This past October, his one year anniversary in heaven, first Saturday, the most brilliant rainbow we could see went across our yard. Jim, it was the perfect setting because it perfectly arced the oak tree in the backyard. It was just beautiful. And the Saturday after, our library had a book sale, so I was there in the children’s section and I was trying to compile two boxes together because I needed an empty box. There was one book that was stuck in the bottom and I couldn’t get it out, so I’m like, okay, it’s meant for me. I’m meant to have this book. I finally got the book unstuck and it was titled Dog Heaven. I felt it was Taffy sending us another message.
JIM HAROLD: It sure seems like it. To me, it falls under that “it’s too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence” kind of situation, and just time and time again, you see those rainbows. I’m more of a dog person. I know people have beloved cats and other kinds of pets; I’m a dog person. But you just know they know a lot more than people give them credit for. They know what you’re thinking. And I think that extends to the other side as well. I think they live on just like I think we live on.
SARAH: I think so. If we have a few minutes, I have one – I don’t know if it’s a headscratcher, but it’s kind of weird.
JIM HAROLD: Sure, go ahead.
SARAH: In our family, the 11th of a month and the 25th of a month have become significant. Taffy was born on the 25th of a month; my little Bonnie was born on the 11th, and she’s a rat terrier/chihuahua mix. Fast forward to June of 2022, and my father passed away on June 11th, which felt significant to me.
Two weeks later, on the 25th, I was at the Humane Society and I connected with a dog. Her name is Lucy. I bring Lucy home, and Jim, it is just uncanny – her obsession with Bonnie, which Taffy had. Her obsession with cleaning Bonnie’s face. Taffy was always cleaning Bonnie’s face and ears. The very first night at home, Lucy walked over to Taffy’s bed, curled up, and loves playing with his toys. I don’t know if he sent her to us, or she might be a little reincarnation of Taffy, have a little bit of him in her. But it’s just so sweet when we have those moments with her.
JIM HAROLD: They’re part of the family, those little pets, or sometimes big pets, big dogs. People have Great Danes and things. But regardless, they really are an extension of the family, and that goes to cats and other pets as well. Sarah, thank you so much for sharing this. I think it gives people a lot of comfort who have pets and who have lost them as well – but not really lost them. They’re still around.
SARAH: Right.
JIM HAROLD: Thank you for being on the show.
SARAH: Thank you so much, Jim. Have a great day.
JIM HAROLD: Next up on the line is Sam from Washington State. She’s been listening on and off for a few years, and we’re so glad she found us. She and her husband moved into an apartment, and as I’m fond of saying, strangeness ensued. Sam, welcome to the show and tell us about this spooky apartment.
SAM: Thank you for having me. We had decided to move to a new apartment that was about halfway between our jobs, and we found one that listed itself as a luxury apartment. We’re like, “Great. Perfect.” It had a soaking tub and stuff. We go, we sign all the paperwork, but we’re not able to see any of the unit or anything like that before we move in. On move-in day, we get our keys, and as I’m taking our first box up the stairwell, I see on the second floor landing a shadow person.
JIM HAROLD: Ooh.
SAM: I wear glasses, and I’m pretty blind without them, so I was like, maybe I just caught something out of the corner of my eye, like a person, and they were just fuzzy. I let it go and we went back to moving, but almost every time we went up the stairs, I saw shadow people. Or down the stairs. Almost always on the second floor landing. I didn’t say anything; my husband and I were still dating at the time, so it was like, I don’t want to be that weird person who’s like, “Hey, love of life, do you see weird people on the stairwell too?” So I didn’t say anything and I let it go. But without a doubt, almost every time we went up and down the stairwell, I saw a shadow person on our second floor.
And then, after we had moved in and settled in, I would be home alone and I would be off in our bedroom or something, and in our kitchen I could hear what sounded like somebody taking out groceries and putting them away. I would hear the rustle of the plastic bags, I’d hear our cabinets open and shut, and footsteps walking around. Again, I believe in ghosts and all that, but I don’t jump to that. I was like, luxury apartments, I guess it’s not very insulated and I must be hearing our neighbor. Which I went with up until I found out we actually didn’t have a next-door neighbor. No one had moved into that unit yet, and we only had a neighbor to the side of us and to the bottom of us. So nobody’s there.
Finally, one day we’re taking the dog out and I see the shadow person again, so I stop my husband and I go, “Do you see anything?” He goes, “Do you mean the shadow person?”
JIM HAROLD: Oh, you hadn’t been telling each other you were both seeing it.
SAM: No. We were both seeing it, and he told me he was seeing it from the first day we moved in, from that first box he took up. So as we go on our walk, he goes, “Do you also hear the person in our kitchen?” I was like, “Yes! With the plastic bags!” Which also was odd because in our area, plastic bags were no longer used. You had to pay a fee or something like that, so most people used the fabric ones or whatever. It was just so odd.
And that’s sort of where it stayed. We would hear the person in our kitchen, we would see the shadow people. But at that time, I was commuting about four hours roundtrip and my husband was doing about three hours roundtrip, so we weren’t home super a lot – until COVID hit, and then we’re home all the time.
We set up in such a way my husband was in the living room, so his back would be towards the kitchen, and he would still hear the noises, like somebody was back there. He’d turn around and it would stop. Then he would go back to working and it would start right back up again. And then when I was working while he was taking the dog out, I would be in our bedroom with the door shut and I would hear footsteps walking around our unit and just going about their day. It was such an odd experience. But nothing was ever scary or frightening. We were just seeing the shadow people and hearing the people walking in our apartment.
There were a few instances that really stuck out to us. My husband started seeing a woman in our apartment.
JIM HAROLD: Oh my.
SAM: I never saw her, but we think that she was most likely the one making the noises. But the one that stuck out the most to him – we were getting ready for bed, and I was brushing my teeth and he was making the bed. He could see me in the bathroom brushing my teeth, and as he’s watching me, he sees a woman walk across our bedroom door, going from one side of our apartment to the other.
JIM HAROLD: Oh my goodness.
SAM: Then I come out and I’m just like, “Let’s turn off the light!” and shut off the light and go to bed. [laughs] That one really freaked him out, and I actually forgot that one until I was telling him I was going to do this recording, and he said he downplayed it so much because he didn’t want to scare me and go, “We need to move.”
JIM HAROLD: It’s one of those things, it seems like there was something going on there for sure. Maybe I missed it – did you know anything about the people who lived there before?
SAM: We knew nothing about anyone who lived there before. I looked up the apartment complex, trying to see if anything had happened there that might’ve made the news or anything like that, but nothing that I saw. The apartment itself was not very old. It was new construction, and before that it had just been forested area. So there wasn’t anything there beforehand. We don’t know what it was. It just became so routine, we just talked to each other like, “I saw the shadow person on the third floor this time” kind of thing.
But for us, what also was remarkable was we had experienced this almost every day or every few days up until I got a positive pregnancy test. And then it all completely stopped. We never saw another shadow person or anything.
JIM HAROLD: See, that’s interesting. Why do you think that is?
SAM: I don’t know. We talked about it ,and we don’t really know, but we had a conversation in the apartment where I told my husband, “I don’t want to be scared because I don’t want that to affect the baby.” Because he had a habit of trying to hide behind doors or behind other things and jump out and scare me, and I told him I need him to stop because I don’t want to be scared while I’m pregnant. We don’t know if maybe whatever was in there heard and decided to stop or they just – we don’t know.
JIM HAROLD: Very interesting. Very interesting indeed. Sam, thank you so much for sharing this story. Now, are you still in that apartment? You moved out, right?
SAM: We moved out. We moved out a few days before we actually gave birth. I had been curious if it would start up again after I gave birth or not, but we were out by then.
JIM HAROLD: And nothing else has happened?
SAM: Nothing else has happened, no.
JIM HAROLD: Maybe it was some kind of respect. Maybe it realized you were pregnant and said, “Okay, I’m going to back off now.”
SAM: It could’ve absolutely been something like that too.
JIM HAROLD: Sam, thank you for listening and thank you for sharing your story on the Campfire tonight.
SAM: Thank you, Jim.
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You’re listening to Jim Harold’s Campfire.
JIM HAROLD: We have a return caller. You might remember a while back that Kestrel was on the show and talked about some haunted toys and decorations from her house, and now she’s going to tell us about a workplace story and something that happened to her in Ireland. She joins us again from New Hampshire. Kestrel, it just seems like we spoke mere moments ago, but here we are again. Please tell us about – let’s start with that workplace story.
KESTREL: Sure, absolutely. For a winter season, I worked as a housekeeper at a hotel in a small town in New Hampshire. This hotel had been many different things before; it was a much older building that had a few different occupations, basically, before it became a hotel. I had been working there for about a month, I think, when I started to hear some of the housekeepers talk about the fact that nobody really liked going up to the third floor to work, especially if they had to go up by themselves.
Since I was the newest one there, I kind of felt like I had something to prove, I guess, so I was always like, “Oh, it’s okay, I’ll go up and do it.” The first couple of times I went up there by myself, I noticed this really, really strong scent of cigar smoke throughout the entire floor. I would call down to the hotel manager or the person on the front desk and be like, “Hey, somebody’s smoking up in the rooms. They’re not supposed to be doing that. It’s really stinking up the hallways.” The first time, he came up and checked, knocked on doors and that kind of stuff, and finally the lead housekeeper was like, “Hey, that’s not a guest smoking. That’s someone who’s been here for a long time,” was kind of the way that she put it. She didn’t want to say the word “ghost” or “haunted,” but that’s what she was getting at. So I continued when I was working up there to smell the cigar smoke.
The elevator would come up to the third floor when nobody had called it. You could hear it ding when it came up, so it would come up to the third floor and sit there for a few minutes and then go back down seemingly on its own. Sometimes the doors would open but nobody would walk in or out.
And then this is something that happened to another housekeeper, not to me. The ghost, whoever they were, seemed friendlier towards me overall, I guess. But she was working up there by herself and I came up to help her finish the last few rooms. She was working in the room next door to me, and I heard her gasp. I was like, “Oh, what happened?” I went over to her and she goes, “I feel like something just scratched me,” and she pulled her shirt up and she had scratch marks down her…
JIM HAROLD: Oh my.
KESTREL: Yeah. She was making the bed. There was no way she could’ve injured herself in the process of what she was doing. So those are the weird instances that occurred there. It was one of those, everybody just got a bad feeling on the third floor. You just kind of went up and did your tasks as quicky as you could and then went back down.
JIM HAROLD: Interesting, very interesting. It’s one of those things. A hotel to me would seem rife with opportunity for hauntings. There’s just so many people coming and going with different stories. It’s kind of like good, bad, happy, sad, the whole gamut of human emotions. Maybe a couple stayed there as a romantic getaway, or maybe somebody went there to attend a funeral. There’s so many different kinds of emotions in hotels, like a lot of other places.
And you also had an interesting international experience. Tell us about that one.
KESTREL: Yeah. This one actually happened to me earlier this year. My partner and I went to Ireland, and one evening we went down to visit this castle that was near where we were staying. It was later; it was approaching sunset. We were the only ones down there. This castle was set near a river. My partner wandered around the castle. It was gated, so you couldn’t go inside, but he was just wandering around outside of it, and I walked down towards the river by myself for a little while and just absorbed the place.
I’d been sitting there for, I don’t know, probably five or seven minutes, and I heard very distinctly a voice say my name. It was like, “Kestrel.” I didn’t even think about it; I assumed it was my partner calling me. So I got up and went to go find him, and he’d wandered kind of far in the other direction away from me. When I found him, I was like, “Oh, what’s going on? Are you ready to leave?” He’s like, “What are you talking about? What do you mean?” I was like, “I heard you call me. What’s up?” He was like, “I didn’t call you. I’ve just been sitting here.” I was like, “Oh, okay. Were you listening to music or singing?” I was trying to come up with why I thought I heard someone say my name. He was like, “No, I’ve just been sitting here, taking it all in.”
Also, once I realized he hadn’t said my name, I realized that it sounded like it came from behind me and not a little to the side where he would’ve been anyway. So yeah, I have no concept of what it could’ve been. I don’t really know the history of that castle or anything like that, but we were the only ones there, and it very clearly said my name. And it’s not like my name is a common one that someone else would’ve been shouting.
JIM HAROLD: Right. It’s interesting. I’ve had various people say they’ve heard disembodied voices. It’s got to be an odd feeling specifically to have someone call your name, and to know that, again, you have a unique name. It’s a cool name; it’s not like “Jim” that used to really be popular. Not so much these days, but millions of people have it. But with a name like Kestrel that really is very unique, you couldn’t mistake it for anything else. That is pretty cool. Kestrel, thank you so much for joining us and telling us your stories again and for being part of the Campfire.
KESTREL: Yeah, of course.
JIM HAROLD: Sydney is on the line and she is going to tell us about a story from high school. You might remember a while back, she told us a childhood story of when she was eight from the Crescent Hotel, but now we’re going to jump to her high school years and more spookiness and more paranormal stuff. Sydney, welcome back to the show, all the way from Arkansas. Appreciate it very much. Tell us what happened.
SYDNEY: Thank you so much, Jim. In high school, we had a group of friends, and for whatever reason, we liked going to cemeteries. Living in the South, there are a lot of Civil War era cemeteries, so we would go to those and take those old flash cameras and go out there and photograph the orbs and kind of freak ourselves out and stuff.
One night, one of my friends lived about five miles from this cemetery that was next to a creek. It was off in the woods. You would go back there and there were some headstones that went back to like the mid-1800s. We rode back there, and there were probably 10 of us all in one truck – very illegal – riding in the bed of the truck. We get there, hop out, and there was this huge tree. I mean, this tree had to have been 100+ years old. One of my friends pulls out his cellphone, and my friend actually had her little camera too, and they were like, “Sydney, let us take your picture.”
So they take the picture on both devices and both of them are like, “Oh my gosh.” They start freaking out. I run over, and you can see a picture of me, but then behind me, in the tree, it looks like there is someone actually hanging from a noose.
JIM HAROLD: Oh my lord.
SYDNEY: Yes. And what was crazy, it was on both devices. It wasn’t like maybe a funky glare on a cellphone camera. You know how sometimes you can do that with the flash; it can make things look weird. But it was on the camera too. We all freaked out. Even the guys were screaming. We hopped back in the truck and took off. That was the last cemetery we ever went to. That freaked us out enough that we were like, “I don’t think we need to go back anymore.”
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, I think that would do it. That would definitely do it for me. Any idea of any history or anything?
SYDNEY: Yeah. We actually went back during the daytime and read over some headstones and stuff, and from what we gathered, there was a man that had been captured by the enemy during the Civil War, and from speculation of reading online – I wish I could remember his name, but this was like 15 years ago – but from the speculation online, they think he was actually hung. We don’t know if maybe it was him. It’s doubtful that he would’ve been hung from that specific tree, but yeah, we really don’t know. Other than – like I said, names that we had googled and stuff like that, they were all in the Civil War. That’s really all we could ever find.
JIM HAROLD: It’s interesting, that kind of history of a place. Certainly the Civil War, if you think about it, really one of the tragic, tragic events in U.S. history and how many people died with that. I think we lose sight of that. If there had been battles and things that had taken place there, people buried there, it seems like they would have a lot of energy. Well, Sydney, thank you so much for calling again, and once again sharing your Campfire story.
SYDNEY: Thank you so much, Jim.
JIM HAROLD: Next up on the Campfire is Clay from LA, and he has a story that involves the Campfire and is quite the coincidence. It’s really pretty wild. I’m not going to spoil it; I’ll let him tell you all about it. Clay, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us, and tell us about this wild Campfire coincidence.
CLAY: Thank you, Jim. I’ve been wanting to tell this story for eight years, as long as I’ve been listening, and I keep putting it off. But about two months ago you had a caller share a story about something really strange that happened to him while he was living in an Apartment 108 in East Hollywood. I had to laugh at first because I used to live in an Apartment 108 in East Hollywood. He heard voices and he saw things. I never heard or saw anything in my apartment, so I was like, “Eh, I’m sure it’s different.” But then it occurred to me that the story I want to tell today happened while I was living in that Apartment 108 in East Hollywood.
JIM HAROLD: Ooh. So tell us what happened.
CLAY: My story starts in the summer of 2007. I had just gotten married and I was unemployed, which is not strange because I work in television, and it’s very common to work on a show for six to nine months and then the show gets cancelled and you’re unemployed. On this particular Friday, I get a phone call from a showrunner who’s offering me a job as writer’s assistant on his we show. I’m excited, I take it, he’s like, “Great. You’re going to start Monday.” I said, “Great.” He says, “But real quick, tomorrow, on Saturday, a woman named Emily is going to call you and she’s going to catch you up to speed about what you’re going to do Monday. She’s your supervisor.” I was like, “Great.”
But the thing is, Jim, that’s strange. You don’t normally have this preemptive phone call. You just show up Monday and you start the gig. So she calls Saturday and she’s a very nice woman. We probably talked for an hour. Very uneventful phone call. The next day, Sunday, I’m driving on the freeway, just in a daze of traffic, and I have this thought. The thought is: “I wonder if I’ll ever get to work on a Jim Henson production.” Never done that before, never thought about it before, but the thought comes and it’s got this weight to it that I can’t describe.
The next morning is Monday morning. I’m putting my shoes on, getting ready for work in Apartment 108, and I have this next thought. This thought in my head is about the poet Ogden Nash. I don’t know much about him, but I have a book of his poetry. I put my shoes on, I walk downstairs into the living room, and my wife is watching the TV, and Meredith Viera is on TV. She goes, “To quote the great Ogden Nash…” and then she quotes him. I stop in my tracks and I’m like, “Whoa, I was just thinking about him.” I tell my wife and she’s like, “Yeah, whatever.” I dismiss it.
I go to work on the first day of work. I show up, Emily’s there. She meets me. She says, “Hey, Clay. Do me a favor. Sit in this office. I have a few things I want to get done before I come get you and then we’ll start the day.” I said, “Great.” I’m sitting in this office by myself. My cellphone rings, and it’s a number I don’t recognize. I answer it and it’s a woman. She says, “Hi, is this Clay?” I say, “Yes.” She goes, “Hi, my name is So-and-so.” No idea who she is. She goes, “I got your name and number from So-and-so.” No idea who that person was. She goes, “Listen, I am staffing up a new Jim Hansen show, and I’m curious if you’re available to work.” I get goosebumps, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, thank you so much. I literally just started a job today. I can’t quit this job to go,” but I’m having this freakout moment in this office alone.
End of the day, I’m driving home at night and I’m at a red light, looking up at this boring billboard, and I have another thought. This thought is about NASA. The light turns green, I drive a few blocks trying to get to the freeway, I pull up to the redlight at the onramp, I’m sitting there, and my eyes focus and the car in front of is just covered in NASA bumper stickers. Like 10 NASA bumper stickers. The light turns green, it gets onto the freeway, I follow it. As it turns left, the whole left panel of this car is covered in NASA emblems. This is not an official NASA car. This is just someone who’s a big fan of NASA.
This is all in one day, and I’m freaking out. I’m following this car at a pretty good clip on the freeway, and I call my wife on speaker and I’m like yelling. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, this is happening! I don’t know what it means! It’s almost as if somebody out there is trying to tell me something and I’m getting the message but I don’t know how to decipher it. I feel like I should just follow this car and go wherever it goes.” As soon as I said those words out loud, the car zips to the right across four empty lanes and exits the freeway. It happened so fast that if I wanted to do that, I could not have safely done that. In the moment, I took that as somebody out there saying, “Okay, I’ve got your attention. It’s not about the car, but I’ve got your attention.”
This kicks off a series of – at the time what I would call signs because I didn’t really know the word “synchronicities” yet – that happened every other day, every day, sometimes multiple times a day. And every time, they had this weight to them. I’ve had déjà vu, I’ve had weird coincidences. This was something different. Early on, I decided that if this was someone on the other side trying to talk to me, maybe it was my granddad. He died in 1989 while my family was on summer vacation in Paris and we had to cut our trip short. He was basically the one person that I decided to – I declared they were from him whether they were or not, and every time I got one, I would vocalize and verbalize and validate them to him.
Months later, it’s Halloween. I’m at work. In the early 2000s, on Halloween, instead of listening to cool podcasts, I would read people’s ghost stories on Fark.com. I’m reading them all day long, and I get to this one. It’s a very short and sweet story about a little ghost girl in a cemetery, and it really resonates with me. I ask Emily, “Hey Emily, can I read this story to you?” She’s like, “Yeah.” I read Emily this story and she’s like, “Yeah, that was pretty good.” I was like, “I think so.” She goes, “But you know that’s not how it works, right?” I say, “Not how what works?” She goes, “Ghosts.” I was like, “Please elaborate.”
She proceeds to tell me that not only does she see ghosts, but that ghosts come to her looking for help. She’s basically a ghost whisperer. What’s crazy is I have worked with this woman at this point for like three or four months, never gotten any indication that she’s into the paranormal or kooky or however you want to describe it. She starts to tell me how this happens and that when it does, she hates it and it scares her, and she makes a deal immediately that “I will help you if I can, but I can’t, you have to leave me alone regardless afterwards.” I’m really thrown by this.
About a week later, it’s November 10th. I’m driving home from work and I decide I’m going to stop in to the local video rental place – because there still was one in ’07 – to get a documentary for my wife and I. I’m staring at this wall of documentaries, probably seven shelves, maybe 100 titles. I’m looking at the spines of all of them, and one of them pops out. It’s called Mailer on Mailer. I grab it and I look at it and it’s a documentary on Norman Mailer. I think, “Wow, that sounds boring.” [laughs] So I put it back and I wind up not getting anything. I get back in my car, I drive the last two and a half blocks to my apartment, and as I’m driving, the woman on the radio says that Norman Mailer has died.
I’m telling you, all of these are happening – some of them are really significant like that and some of them are small. A couple days later, the 2007 writers’ strike hits, and over the course of a few days the whole city shuts down. I don’t know if you remember that.
JIM HAROLD: I do remember it, yes.
CLAY: We all lost our jobs. Everything shut down. About a week later, I realized that I had not had a sign in a while. They just sort of stopped. I got kind of bummed. Another week passed and I was like, “Yeah, I guess they’re just not happening anymore.” And then it dawned on me that this whole thing, all of these synchronicities, started the day after I had this phone call with Emily and ended as soon as I lost my job with Emily.
My only explanation, I feel like, is somehow, just by being close to her for that period of time, maybe I tapped into something that she had. Whether you want to believe it or not, it coincides with that time to a T.
JIM HAROLD: Wow, that’s pretty wild. And all these things happened. I love the capping coincidence of you living in Apartment 108. There was a TV show or a book or something where people lived in the same apartment and paranormal stuff kept happening in that apartment. You’d probably know it better than I would, but that’s what it made me think of.
CLAY: Oh yeah, I know what you’re talking about. Every episode’s a different – yes, yes. A hotel room, I think.
JIM HAROLD: And then the other piece, though, is that kind of makes sense that you tapped into her, and you kind of – I guess for lack of a better phrase, gained her powers temporarily.
CLAY: I did. I feel like I fed off of it. And Jim, if I could have two seconds for a quick coda.
JIM HAROLD: Sure, go ahead.
CLAY: Basically, this is why I think it really was my granddad. About a month later, my wife and I decide we’re going to go see a psychic medium. We’ve never done that before. We’re driving to the medium in Hollywood, and my wife’s driving and she says, “Hey Clay, can you open my phone and get the address to double-check?” I open the phone and for the first time I see the address, and she lives on Ogden Street. I’m in the car and I’m like, it’s full circle. This is crazy.
We have the meeting with her, and when she gets to me, she’s like, “I’m picking up on an older male figure on your mom’s side,” and I’m thinking, “Okay, that’s maybe my granddad.” She said, “He’s showing me a slice of cake, which typically means a celebration, a birthday or something, and he’s telling me June. Is your birthday in June?” I said, “No, it’s not in June.” She’s like, “Hmm.” I said, “I got married in June.” And I get it, everyone gets married in June, so that didn’t mean anything to me. She’s like, “Yeah, maybe. Is your granddad’s birthday in June?” I said, “I don’t know.” She says, “Did he die in June?” I said, “He died while I was on summer vacation in Paris, so it could’ve been June. I don’t know.” She says, “Just know that he’s sending love” and all that stuff.
I’m driving home and I call my mom. I say, “Mom, when did Granddad die?” She got real quiet on the other side and she said, “Clay, Grandma and I didn’t want to say anything, but Granddad died on your wedding anniversary.” June 16th, which is right when this story started also. This all started right after I got married. And that’s why I think it was my granddad.
JIM HAROLD: Interesting. Clay, thank you so much for joining us, and I appreciate you being a part of the Campfire.
CLAY: Thank you, Jim.
JIM HAROLD: Next up we have a return caller. I love the subject of guardian angels, and that’s a good thing because Ronald says he has a few stories for us, short stories but sweet stories, of guardian angels. Ronald, welcome back to the show. Thank you for joining us again, and tell us about these guardian angels.
RONALD: The first one, I was a couple of weeks old. My mom decided to come in and check for me. When she saw me, she said my lips were black. She picked me up. We were staying with my grandmother. She realized that I had phlegm in my throat. She was able to get it out, got me to breathing, and when she got me to the doctor, he told her I had been clinically dead for a short period.
So everything was going great. Then I was about 14-15 years old. My dad, my brother, and me were rebuilding the engine on a truck. We had it sitting out and it rolls out and hits the extension cord about the same time my hands grabbed it. I remember hearing somebody say, “Enough!” I vaguely saw something out of the corner of my eye and saw a 2 x 4 hit my arms, knocking my hands off the engine. Once again, I walked away.
Next time, it was 1988, ’89, and I was going past this flea market. I was going too fast. Didn’t realize a guy was turning in to the flea market, and I cut too quick, dropped off, and when I got back on, I spun out and went into the ditch the other way, facing back the direction I was going. I felt something grab the outside of my ankles. I was driving a stick shift, and it guided me between the steering wheel and the stick shift, hitting neither one of them. I felt the back glass slide along my back as it was tumbling into the ditch. Once again, walked away from it. Shook up when I got out of the truck, but walked away from it.
A year or two later, I was going back to the house before I went in to work. Saw this pickup come from a side street. I could tell instantly he wasn’t going to stop for the stop sign. The guy in front of me – you know the two-second rule, where you pick an object and count “one, two”? The guy keeps right on coming. The guy in front of me hits him, and I heard a voice say, “You can drive around it.” I don’t know how I missed it, even to this day. I got stopped about a quarter mile down the road because the speed limit at that time was like 60 miles an hour. The guy who hit the guy in the pickup wound up dying, and I got called as a witness because they filed charges on the guy. He was drunk.
I met one of the guys that was behind me, and he was saying how quick I went around him. And here’s a strange thing. As I went around him, as I looked, it looked like I was inside of a racecar. You know the roll cage? I remember seeing that in my vehicle. Now, that may have been from when I had seen Days of Thunder a few days before.
JIM HAROLD: Right, that movie with Tom Cruise, Robert Duvall. Good movie.
RONALD: Yes. One of the few Tom Cruise movies I will watch.
A few years later, I was working third shift and I stopped at a fast food place to get something to eat before I went in. Truck was running fine. Walked out, it would not start. I had noticed somebody walking towards me. Looked like – you know those old hook canes that shepherds use? He had that in one hand, and he had the – you know how you associate the woolly vest with shepherds? He was wearing that. He walked up, asked me if everything was all right. “Yes, just the battery.” He said, “Okay, I’m going to go on.”
I looked in the direction he was walking towards – he was gone. I tried calling in to work, got no answer. My boss had already left for work. I said, “Let me try this one more time.” Reached in, cranked right up. Somebody or someone was wanting me to stay there a few minutes longer. I drove in to work, there were no signs of a wreck or anything, so I wondered, if I hadn’t had that issue, if I would’ve hit something or got hit by something. To this day, I don’t know. Don’t even understand because that was the only time I had that trouble with that vehicle not starting.
I don’t remember seeing him come from a distance. It’s like he popped out of nowhere, asked if everything was all right, I said, “Yeah, it’s just the battery,” and within two seconds after walking past me he was gone. To this day, I say I heard, felt, and seen my guardian angel. How else can I explain it?
JIM HAROLD: It seems like you’ve had a lot of close calls and someone’s definitely looking out for you. I think that seems to be the case, Ronald.
RONALD: Yes. That’s how I feel.
JIM HAROLD: Absolutely. It seems like to me that when you get in one of these situations, something dramatic happens and you’re saved. I’m assuming that’s something you’re very thankful for.
RONALD: Yes. Sometimes I tell people that sometimes, even though I’m the only one in the truck, I have two passengers: my guardian angel and, I hate to say it, the Angel of Death. It’s like they’re sitting in the backseat talking to each other. One is the Angel of Death saying, “Is it his time?” The guardian angel says, “No, it’s not. We want him out there for a little bit longer.” That’s basically my five stories.
JIM HAROLD: Well, Ronald, bless you, and I’m glad that it’s working out for you and you’ve got that guardian angel. I believe that we all have a guardian angel. Certainly yours is working overtime for you. Ronald, thank you so much for being a part of the Campfire.
RONALD: Thank you, and y’all stay spooky.
JIM HAROLD: Thank you so much for tuning in to the Campfire. We certainly appreciate it, and thank you so much. Please support our sponsors. We would appreciate it very much.
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Also be sure to check out the new free podcast Unpleasant Dreams – at least, it is new in the sense that we have a new format for Season 3. This week’s episode, “The Monkey’s Paw. And also, Jim Harold’s Crime Scene. I hope you check that out as well. We’ll have a brand new episode of that on Monday.
We thank you so much. We’ll talk to you next time. Have a great week, everybody, and stay safe and of course, as always, 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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