A young girl dreams of an abandoned Victorian mansion only to learn a strange fact years later. Plus, a flirtatious ghost and much more on this edition of Campfire!

-TRANSCRIPT-

We start the show off this week with one of those stories that just leaves you scratching your head and saying, “How in the world do you explain that?” That story and much more on this all-new edition of 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, and if you’re new here, what we do is share spooky stories. They are real stories. Could be ghosts, could be UFOs, could be crazy cryptid creatures, but whatever they are, they are real stories and they are fascinating. Welcome to our show.

Just a quick personal note. I wanted to thank you all out there on social media. I had posted in the last several days that my wife Dar had come down with COVID, and thank goodness, she’s doing okay. She’s well on the road to recovery, and we’re very thankful for that. Me and the girls, thus far! – thus far with an exclamation point – have tested negative. So I just wanted to reassure everyone things are trending positively, and we thank you for all of your well wishes.

Now, let’s get on to this all-new edition of Campfire. We’ve got some great stories for you, so enjoy.

We have a return caller. Sophia is back from Colorado. We’re so glad to speak with her once again. A few episodes back, I talked about astral projection and how that is a topic that fascinated me and that I would love for people to call in if they’ve had experiences. And Sophia said, “That’s me!” So here she is. She’s going to tell us about – I guess you could call this a headscratcher. Sophia, welcome back and please tell us what happened.

SOPHIA: Thank you very much for having me back, Jim. Like you said, I kind of remembered all of this after you mentioned astral travel on a previous show. At the base of this story is a house in the neighborhood that I grew up in. We lived at the bottom of a hill where this whole neighborhood was built around, and at the top of this hill was a huge yellow Victorian mansion. Just this gorgeous old house, but it was a little decrepit. The paint was peeling. Some of the windows were broken out. Nobody had lived there, clearly, for quite a long time.

When I was really little – four, five – I thought this place looked like a dollhouse, and I desperately wanted to go play in this dollhouse and could not for the life of me understand why my parents would not let their four-year-old go play in an abandoned mansion. Couldn’t figure it out. I remember I would say, “But Mama, it looks like a dollhouse,” and she’d be like, “Well, we can’t go play in it today.” I started calling it my dollhouse, and it was kind of this running joke we had in our family. It was a really gorgeous place. It overlooked the whole town. You could see it from the highway. I was just intrigued by it.

I remember at some point – I must’ve been in about first or second grade – I started having dreams that I would go explore this house at night. In these dreams, I would fly out of our house and I would fly up the hill. I would go around to the back of the hill, where it turns out there was a road, and I would fly up to the back door of this old Victorian house. I remember in my dreams that it was white, and I would fly through the door and I would go fly around inside this house.

I can distinctly remember that it had a smell. It’s this abandoned old house. It was kind of dusty. Some of the windows were broken. I remember the wallpaper was also kind of yellow and floral and was peeling in a lot of places. There was some furniture. It had clearly been abandoned for a long time, so it seemed like there was just some stuff leftover. There was a piano in one room right when you came through the back door. And I would just have a blast and, in my dream, float around in this house and have fun. At some point I would realize it was time to go home and I would float home, and that would be the end of it. That was the end of the dream.

I know that I used to mention these dreams to my parents, oftentimes at breakfast. I had a dream that I went and played in that house and completely freaked my dad out, and my mom thought it was kind of cool. She would be like, “Oh, that’s really interesting. I wonder what that house does look like on the inside.”

This continued for a while, these dreams where I would go see this house. I know I went up to the top floors sometimes, but I usually stayed on the bottom floor. Not really sure why that was. Eventually I forgot about it. They stopped happening. I think it was around about the time in my life where I stopped caring about things like dolls and I never thought about it again. But this house was always there. It was a visual marker, like everybody in town knew about this house.

I didn’t think about this again until I went to college. I went to college in state and I would come home on the weekends to do my laundry. [laughs] I came home and I’m doing my laundry one weekend, and my mom goes, “Oh, remember your dollhouse?” I was like, “That big yellow Victorian?” She goes, “Yeah. It’s been condemned. It’s going to be demolished.” I was like, “What do you mean, they’re going to demolish it? That’s my house. You can’t demolish my house.” She said, “It’s been abandoned for so long, I guess it would be too expensive to fix it up, so the city let a contractor and a developer – they’re going to purchase the lot and build a wedding venue there.” I was like, “My dollhouse…” I was really upset about it.

JIM HAROLD: “Don’t they know? Don’t they know?”

SOPHIA: “Don’t they know about my dollhouse?” I was like, this is probably my last chance to ever see this house. I remember thinking, oh my gosh, I had dreams about this house when I was a little kid, and I remember telling my mom, “I had dreams about that house when I was a little kid.” She goes, “Yeah, you did.” I was like, “I’m going to go for a walk.” I’ll never forget it – she looked at me and she goes, “Do not break into that house.” I was like, “I’m not going to break into the house. I just want to go see it.”

JIM HAROLD: Don’t want to get a B&E.

SOPHIA: Right. It’s just it’s not going to be here, and it’s my last chance to see it. It was such a fixture for me when I was little. So I start walking towards it and find that just like the dreams I had when I was little, there is a path that goes around the back of the house that leads to the back door, and the back door of the house is in fact white. Around that time, I remember thinking, “Huh, that’s a lot of things in common.”

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, one thing you can say, “Eh, coincidence.” The second one, “Eh…” Then another thing, it’s like, “Wait a minute here. What’s going on?”

SOPHIA: Right. That’s a lot in common. I remember it was late afternoon/early evening, and I genuinely didn’t want to break into this house. I didn’t want to do anything I shouldn’t do. But when those things were the same, I remember thinking, “I wonder how far these coincidences go. I just wonder.” So I kind of popped up onto the porch – it had this gorgeous wraparound porch – and peeked in through some of the broken windows and saw that the staircase was exactly where it was in my dream. The wallpaper was exactly the same. There was an old piano in the same spot. Everything that I could see through this house was exactly as it had been in my dreams as a child.

I distinctly remember all the hair on the back of my neck standing up when I realized this was a carbon copy of those dreams when I would fly into this house and float around. I sat up there for a while. I was sad that this house was being demolished. I just stood and looked at it for a while and eventually left. I went home and told my mom, “I went and looked at that house. Remember the dreams when I was a kid?” She said, “Yeah. Does it look the same?” I said, “It does.” We just kind of were like, “Hmm, wonder what that was about.”

It was exactly – everything was exactly the same as it was in my dreams, and I had never been close to it when I was younger.

JIM HAROLD: I love these kinds of stories. To me, I’ve got to say – I’m going to tell you a secret. Nobody else will hear this, Sophia. Sometimes I like these better than the ghost stories. [laughs] I’m not going to edit that out. Everybody’s going to hear it. I’m just joking. But I love the idea because it’s something that’s mundane in a way, but then it’s so real. It just makes you think about the nature of reality, and what are the implications of that? You saw what you saw, you experienced what you experienced, you’d never been in the house. You basically saw it as a child in your dreams, and then it turned out to be. Now, what is the greater implication of that? That’s the question. What do you think?

SOPHIA: I don’t know. It’s one of those things that when I realized that I had seen it before, it was incredibly mind-boggling that it was an experience I had. But then I also was like, “I don’t know what to do with this information.” The thing is, I know there are people who say that they can astral project and do that on purpose; this was all completely accidental. I was a little kid who wanted to go see this house that I thought was a dollhouse.

JIM HAROLD: So cool.

SOPHIA: But I don’t know how else to explain it. So maybe that’s possible. And then I don’t really know what to do with it after that. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: Yeah. What else can you say? It is what it is, but it is amazing. Sophia, I love this story. Thank you so much for sharing it today on the Campfire.

SOPHIA: Thank you.

JIM HAROLD: Next up on the Campfire is Wendy, and she’s going to tell us about a ghost tour and some strange goings-on. Wendy, thank you for joining us today from Northern California. Tell us what happened.

WENDY: Thanks, Jim. I’m really happy to be here. This was back in 2007, and my daughter and I were driving cross-country. We’d stopped in San Antonio, Texas, mostly because I had a couple of friends there that I wanted to visit. But while we were there, we decided to go on a ghost tour. My sense is that San Antonio is one of the more haunted cities, although honestly I think most cities are haunted. But overall the tour was really what you’d expect. We walked around town, they told us ghost stories. They had night vision goggles for us. It was fine, it was fun. It was just a typical tour, and I’ve been on a lot of tours and never seen anything. This was like that.

At the end of the tour, though, we end up of course at the Alamo. The Alamo was not open at the time because this is late-ish night, late evening, whatever. But there’s a courtyard out in the front where we were able to hang out. The tour leader said, “This is a great place to look for apparitions.”

There were two apparitions that were seen that night, one by me, one by my daughter, so I’m going to tell you about both of them.

The first one is they had a night vision camera. The tour leader set up the camera so it was looking into the Alamo. Of course, there’s a fence all around the Alamo and it was closed, but there was – it’s hard for me to figure out how to explain this. There was a walkway that was in front of a bunch of buildings and then covered by an awning. He had the camera pointed down this hallway, and there was nothing there. We could see with our eyes, nothing there. On the infrared camera, nothing there.

The guy says, “There’s this one ghost, and oftentimes he’ll come out, but really the best way to get him to make an appearance – he kind of likes the ladies, so if there’s somebody who’s willing to flirt with him, that might encourage him to come out and make an appearance.” Nobody else in the group is stepping forward, so I’m like, “Why not?”

JIM HAROLD: Wendy says, “I’m the person for this job.”

WENDY: Exactly. “I am ready to flirt with some ghosts.” I think that might need to go on my resume – as you’ll see, successful ghost flirter. So I’m like, “Sure.” I start calling out, like, “Hey there. Hey soldier. What are you doing? Come on, what are you doing? Come on out! We just want to say hi. Come on and say hi.” I probably flashed him a little leg, because that’s how I rolled at the time. Who am I kidding, that’s how I would roll now.

So I’m watching the hallway, and nothing. And then looking at the infrared camera, there’s still nothing with my eyes, but on the infrared camera, something appears on the camera. It’s the shape of a person, the size of a person, but the heat signature is blue. So whatever it is, it’s colder than the ambient temperature.

JIM HAROLD: That’s weird.

WENDY: Not a living person who would have a warm heat signature, right? The tour guide was like, “Yep, there he is.” It’s funny because after the fact – of course, my brain can think of a whole bunch of ways that maybe this was a hoax, but I don’t think it was. I think that I really saw that. I think that was a genuine apparition that we saw that day. That’s how I’ve always held that moving on into the future. So that was kind of fun. That’s my ghost flirt story.

I think the other story actually is more interesting for the reason you’ll find out at the end. This was my daughter. While I was flirting with the ghost, my daughter had actually wandered off a little bit. She was nine at the time. She was in view; she hadn’t wandered. She was just at the other end of the courtyard. If you’re standing right in front of the main gates of the Alamo, she was there looking down into a hallway on that side.

She comes back over and she says, “I saw something.” The tour guide’s like, “What did you see?” She describes that there was a person standing. She could see the whole person standing straight up at attention from the collarbone down. There wasn’t really a face that she could see. Just standing there still, standing at attention. The tour guide said, “Can you describe this figure?” She describes in really good detail the uniform, the jacket, the gun, everything that this person was wearing. The tour guide says, “Yeah, that’s a Mexican soldier. That sounds like one of the members of the Mexican Army around the time that the Battle of the Alamo happened.” Which is cool.

But then he gets this look on his face and he says – and this is paraphrasing. I don’t remember his exact words, but it was something like “If I were you, I wouldn’t go telling people around here that you saw that.” I was like, “Wait, what?” Again, paraphrasing, but he said, “According to the history that’s come down to us about the battle, no one from the Mexican Army ever made it through into that part of the fort.”

So basically, there was no reason that any apparition of a Mexican soldier should be there according to the traditional history of the Alamo, the way that it’s told in Texas at least.

JIM HAROLD: So they would get upset because they would feel like, “The Mexicans never made it.”

WENDY: Exactly. So I just feel like my daughter saw that her sighting was something that contradicts the version of history that people in Texas want to believe, and I didn’t get the feeling that the ghost tour guide was saying “No, you couldn’t have seen that.” He was saying, “You saw that, but don’t tell people because it contradicts the history that the people around here like to believe.”

I thought those were really interesting as well. So those are our San Antonio ghost stories. Definitely the best and the only ghost things I’ve ever had on a ghost tour. And maybe my kid saw something that retells the story of the Battle of the Alamo in some small way.

JIM HAROLD: It’s one of those things where – what is it they say? History is written by the victors, right?

WENDY: Exactly. It’s a common occurrence for the people writing the thing down to tell it making some little adjustments here and there. And I honestly don’t know enough about the Battle of the Alamo. But one of the things that’s interesting, too, is my kid – at this time she would’ve had no way to know what a Mexican soldier outfit looked like. We hadn’t even done the Alamo tour yet. We did that the following day. So she wasn’t making this up. There was on way that she could’ve had those details. They came from somewhere. To me, that was really strong evidence that she actually was seeing this. It wasn’t her imagination, she wasn’t trying to make something up, because she couldn’t have gotten all those details right. And she had no idea what a Mexican soldier wore in 18-whatever. I just thought that was fun.

JIM HAROLD: Interesting. It looks like you guys got your money’s worth.

WENDY: Absolutely. [laughs] It was definitely a good tour.

JIM HAROLD: And this has been a great story. Actually, two great stories. Wendy, thank you for being a part of the Campfire.

WENDY: Thank you so much, Jim. Have a great day.

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JIM HAROLD: Lacey is on the line from Utah. You know I love doppelganger stories, but this one has a twist. It’s kind of like doppelganger to the next level. Lacey, welcome to the show. I know you’re a new listener, so thank you so much for coming to the table so soon and sharing this story. I can’t wait to hear it. Tell us what happened.

LACEY: Yes, thank you so much. I want to say this happened about 15 years ago or so. I was still living with my parents in their home. I want to preface the story that this was about 15 years ago; my sister lives in a city that’s about two hours north of where my mom and dad live, and she’d just had her second baby, and my dad had gone up to help her with some home improvement projects that she needed to be done. That’s what I’m going to preface the story with because it’s kind of important.

I had gotten home from work before my mom and my dad, and I obviously didn’t know that my dad was helping my sister that day. I just assumed he was working. I got home, I was the only one home, and I got on the computer and I was doing some computer stuff. I don’t really know what I was doing; I can’t remember that. But I was really focused on the computer.

While I was doing whatever I was doing, I heard the garage door of my parents’ house open. I’m like, “Oh, a parent is home.” I didn’t know which one at that point. And then I heard the door open from the garage into the house, and then I realized it was my dad. I could hear the sound of his work boots that he always wore. I heard him come in, and I heard him open the key box and hang up his keys.

What he always would do at this time is walk around into the kitchen – we had a great room, so it’s like kitchen/ family room/ dining room all in one big room. He would go around to the bar in the kitchen, and he’d always rummage through the mail. Even though it was nice little neat sorted piles of whose mail was whose, he’d always have to go through it and make sure there was nothing he was missing.

Then he looked up and he said, “Where’s Mom?” I said, “Oh, she’s not home from work.” “Oh, okay.” He went back to the shuffling, and then he’s like, “Okay, I’m going to go.” I saw him just through my peripheral – again, I never looked at him full on, but I saw him peripherally go down into his bedroom that was right at the front of the hall that was near this great room. I saw the door open, I saw him go in, and then I didn’t see him again for a while, really at all.

But then about 10-20 minutes after this encounter, my mom came home from work. How I always talk to my dad where he would just ask me questions and I never really looked at him, my mom would make it a point to come and look at me face on. So she came and stood in front of me, and she said, “Where’s your dad?” I said, “I think he’s in the bedroom because I saw him come home and I think he went in there. He might be in the bathroom.”

She went, “Okay.” She went in the bedroom and he wasn’t in there. She’s like, “He’s not in there.” I said, “He must be in the TV room.” So she went in the TV room and she’s like, “He’s not there.” I said, “I don’t know, I wasn’t really paying attention. I was just doing this thing on the computer. He may have left.” She pulled out her phone and called him, and he answered. She’s like, “Lacey said that you’ve been home. Where are you?” He’s like, “I’m not at home. I’m at…” and he proceeded to say my sister’s name. “I’m at her house.”

My mom’s like, “Your dad says that he’s at your sister’s house.” I was like, “No, I just talked to him!” I don’t know. I don’t know what happened.

JIM HAROLD: Wow. Let me ask you this – the way that he acted in this interaction, or the dad duplicate, the dad doppelganger – did Dad Doppelganger act in the same way that Real Dad would’ve acted?

LACEY: Absolutely. It was exactly the same. Garage door opened, he came up the stairs, put his keys away, disheveled the mail – that’s another thing I remember. When I got up after my mom was like ,”Dad’s not here, he’s at your sister’s” – I remember the mail was not sorted in the neat little piles. It was all disheveled. I didn’t do that. That’s why my mom, I think, had asked me too, because she saw evidence of him being home too. It was weird. I don’t know what happened.

JIM HAROLD: Do you have any theories?

LACEY: No. I’d been at work. I hadn’t been sick. I wasn’t on any medication that sometimes has those weird side effects. I don’t know. I really don’t know. My parents built that house, they still live in that house, so it’s not like it’s an old home or anything like that.

JIM HAROLD: Pretty awesome. I mean, I think it’s awesome. It’s weird, it’s kind of disconcerting, but it’s kind of a neat story to tell.

LACEY: Yeah. We’ve had some weird things happen in that house, just weird stuff like that, but we don’t know why it happens. It just does.

JIM HAROLD: Interesting. Well, Lacey, thank you for giving us something to think about and being part of the Campfire.

LACEY: All right, thank you so much.

JIM HAROLD: Bill is on the line from Kentucky. He was on, I don’t know, 30 or 40 episodes ago. So good to hear from him again. He’s going to tell us about one of Kentucky’s most haunted places, and he is calling in today from Louisville, Kentucky. We’re so glad to speak with him. Bill, welcome back and tell us about this haunted place.

BILL: Thanks for having me back, Jim. This haunted place – I don’t know if they’d appreciate me calling them out, so I’m not going to say exactly where it is, but it is a pre-Civil War building that apparently met a bad fate when it burned down and some lives were lost. It’s now a country club / golf resort with bed and breakfast and whatnot onsite. My nephew worked there at the time, lived there as a golf pro and golf instructor. Got a bee in his bonnet at one point and said, “Hey, let’s have the family out for Christmas!” This was 2011/2012. Wintertime, nobody’s playing golf. The place is dead empty. So the family said, “Yeah, okay, sure. Let’s go.”

Had the whole run of the place to ourselves. Like I said, nobody there. It’s dead season. My wife at the time and myself get there first. My nephew has gone off to get his wife, who didn’t stay there with him. They had their own separate house. So we’re there by ourselves. We go in and we are in the restaurant/ballroom meeting area. Just this huge area. The kitchen’s connected to it, so we go in the kitchen, get a couple of drinks, and come back out into the sitting area.

We’re sitting on the couch, our drinks are there. We’re conversing. We’re just talking and waiting for the rest of the family to get there. I’m on the couch and facing her, and over her shoulder I can see out the back windows into the back area and whatnot, and she’s facing me, so she’s facing into the restaurant over my shoulder.

We’re conversing, we’re talking, and I see the back entry door open. Apparently I get this weird look on my face because she says, “What? What’s going on?” I didn’t tell her. But the back entry door leads into what would be a mudroom kind of situation. It’s a separate room. Then I see the second door open like there’s somebody coming into the restaurant area.

She clearly sees my reaction and she says, “What? What is going on?” I said, “Nothing. Don’t worry about it. It’s okay.” Not 10 seconds after I said, “Nothing. Don’t worry about it. It’s okay,” both of our drinks start moving on the table. Of course, she sees this, and I go to reach for mine and it gets smacked across the table into the restaurant area.

JIM HAROLD: Oh man. And nothing’s touching it? It just automatically flies off like somebody’s hauled off and hit it?

BILL: Right, like somebody smacked it across the room. it’s not the condensation where it would just fall off the table kind of thing. This thing was smacked across the room. This doesn’t really freak us out because she was a big horror movie person. Loved horror movies. Our first few dates were ghost hunts and ghost adventures, that kind of thing. So we both look at each other and go, “Yeah, okay. That’s a thing that happened. Let’s go upstairs and pick a room before anybody else gets here.”

“Okay, let’s go upstairs. Let’s get out of this room, go upstairs, pick a room to stay in for the weekend before any of the rest of the family gets here.” That’s what we do. While we are upstairs, we hear tink tink, tink tink tink tink tink tink tink on the piano that’s downstairs. There’s nobody else there, Jim. We hear tink tink tink tink tink tink tink and we’re getting a little creeped out at this point. We’re like, what in the world is going on? But we pick our room, get a little bit settled in, get a little bit unpacked.

While we’re unpacking and getting settled in, we hear kids.

JIM HAROLD: Kids?

BILL: Kids. Like little children, running up and down the hallway. Kids. There’s no kids in the family. Even if somebody else in the family had gotten there, there’s no kids. We’re like, “All right, this is a little too much. What in the world is going on?”

My nephew finally does get there and comes in, and from the upstairs balcony where our rooms were, we come out to say hi to him. I come down and I’m like, “Dude, this place is haunted.” To which – I kid you not, Jim – he replies, “Yeah, I know, but don’t tell (his wife) because then she won’t come here.”

JIM HAROLD: Oh man.

BILL: He confirmed – he asked me, “Did you hear the piano?” “Yes, I did.” “Did you hear the kids?” “Yes, I did.” He says, “What else?” I told him about the situation in the restaurant area. He says, “Yep, that’s a thing.”

JIM HAROLD: The cool thing about that is he just said matter-of-factly, yeah, it’s haunted.” It wasn’t like it was any big whoop.

BILL: Oh no, it wasn’t a surprise to him at all. He just asked that we didn’t tell his wife or his wife wouldn’t come there.

JIM HAROLD: That’s pretty cool.

BILL: The next year, same kind of situation, Christmas, whatnot, and we all rolled back up there. But I had talked to another friend of mine and told him what was going on, and I said, “Do you have any kind” – because he ran a paranormal excursion business. He would take people out on ghost tours and that kind of thing. I said, “Do you have any kind of equipment that I can borrow to take up there with us?” Because I was going loaded for bear this time. This was the next year.

He says, “Yeah, sure, here. Take some of these recorders. Take this EMF. Take this EVP thing.” So I went loaded. This time my son came with me. My son at the time was 19-20 years old. So we’re doing the stereotypical, “Is there anyone here?” like you see on Ghosthunters and all the other TV shows. We get readings on the EMF detector. Spikes all the way over to green every time we ask if there’s somebody there. We don’t get any voice recordings or anything like that, but once again, we hear the piano when there’s no one in that room. It’s not playing a tune or anything. It’s just ding ding, ding ding ding like an animal walking across it or something. But there’s nothing there. Once again we hear the children.

That night, the fire alarm goes off for no reason, and we can’t figure out how to get it reset. While we’re doing the exploration, the investigation, my son and I are walking through the restaurant area. I have the EMF detector that goes from red to green depending on how much energy there is in the room, and I’ve got nothing. It’s just baseline red. There’s nothing there. I turn around to say something to my son to the effect of “There’s nothing here,” and it’s like I stabbed a pocket of energy. It spiked all the way to green.

JIM HAROLD: Oh man. So just as you said that, it’s kind of like, “Take a look at this.”

BILL: Right. It’s like it was right behind me, because I turned around to say something to my son and it was like it was literally between him and I. It was right behind me. It spiked all the way to green. I looked at it for a minute, turned back around – fell off. There was nothing there. Turned back around to say something again to him, spiked all the way to green again.

We walked a good three or four feet across the room, did the same thing. It’s not like it was just that one area that had all the “energy.” It’s like something was following us. We were like, “Okay, that’s weird.” In the course of us staying there that night, we did a little bit of research. Looked up this place. It is one of the most haunted places in Kentucky. The local papers covered it.

Come to find out that there was a fire there that devastated the place. There was a nanny and two children that were killed in the fire. And people talk about those ghosts being seen and heard, the children being heard, the laughter being heard. The kids were apparently taking piano lessons from the nanny. So it all started falling into place. We’re like, “Okay, this is a thing.”

The next day, my son and I decided we were going to go up in the attic because something told us to go up in the attic. “Let’s go look in the attic. Let’s see what we can find.” We’re going up into the attic and my son slows down. He doesn’t stop, but he slows his pace quite a bit and he says, “Did you hear that?” I froze, Jim. I couldn’t move. It’s like someone locked up every joint that I had. I was frozen in stark terror that I have never felt before in my life or since. I couldn’t move.

I said, “No, what did you hear?” He said, “All I heard was somebody tell me ‘no.’” I said, “It wasn’t me.” He said, “Someone said no.” And then I started smelling woodburning smoke, like you get off of, for lack of a better term –

JIM HAROLD: A campfire.

BILL: A campfire. [laughs] And once again, I’m standing on the stairway with every intent on going up into this attic. I could not move. I couldn’t function. I couldn’t go forward. I told my son, “We’re not doing this. Let’s go back downstairs. We’re done.” And we were. We were done. That was it. We walked around the house, took a couple of pictures, got some weird mists that were unexplainable kind of thing, but nothing extraordinary. But that was the only time I was struck with utter terror. Something did not want us in that attic.

JIM HAROLD: Really, really interesting. Again, another time where a place that normally you don’t think of in terms of a haunting – haunted. We just recently had another call – and I don’t know when it will be aired, but on a haunted B&B in wine country, so haunted wine country in California. It’s always interesting. Any place there’s people, there could potentially be a haunting.

BILL: Sure. People leave energy behind.

JIM HAROLD: That’s right. Bill, thank you for sharing this fascinating story about this haunted place and space.

BILL: Thank you, Jim. Thanks for having me back on and stay spooky.

JIM HAROLD: Stay spooky.

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JIM HAROLD: Alyssa is on the line. She’s been listening since 2016 and found out about us from Scott and Forrest over at Astonishing Legends, and we appreciate it so much. She’s calling in today from Northern Michigan, and she’s going to tell us about a place that she worked that was haunted. I’ve never heard of one of these being haunted, but I guess almost any place can be haunted, and she’s going to tell us all about it. Alyssa, welcome to the show and tell us what happened.

ALYSSA: Awesome. Yeah, I worked at a haunted t-shirt shop for five summers as I was getting my degree. It was right downtown in the little tourist town that I live in, and yeah, it was crazy. So the building we were in had an upstairs shopping area and then a downstairs, which had an office and a bathroom and a whole giant stockroom which took up almost the entire basement. It ran right up to the sidewalk outside, and it was divided into five rows with three rows intersecting each one. So we had sections 1A, B, and C.

It was a really freaky stockroom. The shelving went up to the ceiling and everything was full of t-shirts and sweatshirts and all sorts of tourist things that you could buy. The lights were on a motion sensor, and they turned off after about 15 minutes or so, so you had to remember to run up to the front of the stockroom to keep them on. There were two aisles, though, where the lights were always dead. No matter how many times they replaced the lights, they would just never stay on.

My first summer there, I felt like something was down there, like I was being watched when I went to go pull stock or check on items. And I found out I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. I found out from my manager and some other people who had been there longer that weird things had been happening. My manager one night in the dead of winter had closed the store and she was down there pulling stock, and she heard somebody walking from one end of the store to the other end of the store and then back. She just jumped up and left. She was like, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m just leaving.”

So we decided to name our ghost for the store, and we called her Bonnie. Every summer, we would tell people about Bonnie and we would creep them out like, “Oh, you’re new here. Let me tell you our ghost stories.” I remember my fourth summer, I had to be downstairs pulling stock. It was about eight or nine at night, and we closed at around ten or eleven because we opened late for the summer.

I was down there and I was the only person down there, and I remember not wanting to go down there because it just freaked me out so much. I didn’t like to go down there at night, and I was like, “I don’t want to do this,” but I was the most senior person in the store at the time, so I decided “I need to do this and just go do my job. It’ll be okay.” So I was standing almost dead in the middle of our stockroom with a pile of sweatshirts and t-shirts ready to go upstairs, and I was looking at my clipboard, trying to figure out what to grab next.

All of a sudden, I hear somebody whisper in my ear, and they said, “Hey!” I looked around and there was nobody there.

JIM HAROLD: Oh man.

ALYSSA: It was insane. So I did what anyone would do. I grabbed my clipboard and some of the clothing and I started walking, kind of running towards the entrance of the stockroom.

As I got there, one of my coworkers was coming down the stairs to show me something. I looked very visibly upset. She immediately asked me what was wrong. I told her what had happened, and she reconfirmed for me that nobody had been downstairs and that I was the only one down there the entire time I was down there. Oh, it was so creepy. And the sound was right in my ear. I feel like if it was a person who said “Hey,” I would’ve felt them right up next to me, like whispering in my ear.

The next day, I apologized to Bonnie for running away because I didn’t want her to be upset. She was just being friendly. I didn’t want to upset her, so I apologized and I told her that she startled me and to not do that again. I was there for about a year longer and I still felt like I was being watched, but I never had another interaction with her again.

JIM HAROLD: You may have mentioned this and maybe I missed it, but what was the history of the place before it was a t-shirt shop?

ALYSSA: We don’t really know that much. I know my manager had decided she was going to try to find out, but the numbering on the street had changed at a certain point. We think it used to be a women’s library, which is really interesting because after I left the t-shirt shop, I went back to school for my library degree.

JIM HAROLD: Oh, cool.

ALYSSA: So we think maybe she just noticed that we had similar interests and wanted to say hi to me. So we think it was a library.

JIM HAROLD: That’s neat. The personal tie-in is kind of cool. Did that change your feel for the paranormal? Were you interested in the paranormal before and this just accelerated it? Or did it start your interest?

ALYSSA: Oh, no, I’ve been interested in the paranormal since I was a kid. I had seen an orb before at my college dorm room, which is a whole other thing, but yeah, it just increased what I was already interested in.

JIM HAROLD: Very cool. Alyssa, thank you so much for joining us on the Campfire and sharing your story.

ALYSSA: Thank you for having me.

JIM HAROLD: Christine is on the line from New York, and she’s with her terrier, Murphy, and they are both loyal listeners. They’ve been listening for several years now and we really, really appreciate it. Christine has a story for us about her brother. Christine, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us, and please tell us what happened.

CHRISTINE: Thanks, Jim. First of all, I have to say my brother was a big animal lover, and secondly that he drove a rust bucket blue Astro van, and both of those are important to the story.

My brother was very ill. This took place in about 2012. I was living in California and he was here in New York, and my sister-in-law had phoned me that I needed to come home to see him. It was a Sunday night. I’ll never forget this. I was watching television; it was about 10:30, 11:00 at night. And my dog – not this one, but a different one – started barking like crazy. So I went to the front door and I looked outside. There was nothing there, and I went back to watching television.

He just wouldn’t stop barking, so I finally said, “Okay, let’s go onto the front porch and we’ll see what’s going on.” So we walked out onto the front porch and he was the happiest dog. His tail was wagging like crazy. He was just a happy dog, big smile on his face. I thought, “There’s nothing out here! What are we doing?” But he was happy.

So we went back in. I went to bed. I was going to fly home the next day. I got a call early that morning about 6 a.m. – my sister-in-law telling me that my brother had passed about 2 a.m., which would’ve been about the exact time we were on the front porch.

JIM HAROLD: Wow.

CHRISTINE: Yeah. It still gives me chills to think about it. It does. And the interesting thing about the blue Astro van is when I went home for his funeral, my niece, his daughter, and I were driving to the funeral, and what should pass us but a rust bucket old blue Astro van. My niece and I looked at each other and said, “What the heck?” [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: So it sounds like he had a way to get the message across, and the reason your dog was so excited is because he had a visitor – because you had a visitor.

CHRISTINE: Yes, that’s it. That’s my story. It just makes me happy to think about it. He came to visit me. My brother came to visit us before he passed.

JIM HAROLD: I’ve heard of those stories before. Years ago, I’d seen a TV show – Dr. Raymond Moody, who does the Life After Life series of books – and he’s been on our show, actually, which was really cool – he talks about people seeing visitation from people who are passing clear across the country, or clear across the world, for that matter. There’s just this ability when all that occurs to transport to other places and say goodbye. Sometimes it’s visible, sometimes it could be more like your situation. But amazing and comforting nonetheless. Christine, thank you so much for sharing your story. I really appreciate it today.

CHRISTINE: Thank you for having us on.

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JIM HAROLD: Jennifer is on the line from California. We’re so glad to speak with her. We’ve talked about different kinds of haunted places and spaces; I don’t think we’ve ever talked about haunted wine country. We’re going to fix this today with Jennifer. And I’ve got to say, hey, I like wine, I like haunted stuff – this is perfect. Jennifer, thank you for joining us and tell us what happened.

JENNIFER: Hi, Jim. Thanks for having me on. This happened about 2007. It was really a sisters trip through wine country. Have you been to Napa Valley before, Jim? Are you familiar?

JIM HAROLD: Unfortunately not. I’m familiar with it as a concept. I’ve seen and I’ve read, but I’ve not been there, unfortunately. Hope to rectify that one day.

JENNIFER: Wonderful. My sister was coming in from out of town. I lived in the San Francisco area. I really wanted to plan a really amazing trip with sisters, going through wine country, stopping, eating, wine tasting, going to the spa. That’s what I planned for this weekend that was happening in November 2007. The plan was to drive from San Francisco, go through the Valley up to the very north part of the Valley, and stop at the last little town called Calistoga.

Those of you who have been to wine country, it is very fancy now. You think “Oh wow” – you wouldn’t think there’s a seedy history. But looking back on it now after I did a little research after this experience, come to find that wine country has a very Wild, Wild West, seedy type of history to it, especially in the late 1800s. What I wanted to do was book a B&B at the very last stop on the wine country highway in Calistoga. I booked a room at the Elms. It was called the Elms at the time, and I booked it because it was just two blocks away from Main Street, Calistoga where we can walk around restaurants for the evening, hang out, relax before going back to the B&B and the spa the next day.

So we started our trip in November and did exactly as planned. We did want to be at the B&B at about 4 p.m. That’s when they have people check in, and usually that’s when most of the wineries close down, so we just meandered through the Valley and made it to the B&B at the check-in time. We basically arrived around 4-ish. It’s still pretty light out, and we came and checked into the B&B.

When we arrived there, Jim – there are pictures of this home. It’s a historic home. It’s beautiful. It’s two stories, it’s restored, and I think they call it Second Empire style home. Obviously, it’s a very prominent home on the block, so whoever built this home was well known, most likely very prosperous. It was built in the mid-1800s, I believe. Went in and we checked in, and inside it was all the wooden – everything was just beautiful. Beautifully restored. Talked to the owners. They were very welcoming, and they checked us in and showed us around the ground floor.

Then they did something really interesting. I don’t know if you’ve ever had this done, but they said, “Okay, here’s your key to the front door.” I was like, “Oh.” Because usually the B&B owners stay at the home. After they gave the key, in a couple of moments I asked, “Oh, will you not be here to open the door in the evening for us?” They said, “Actually, we don’t stay on the property anymore. After dinner service we leave, and we come back at breakfast.” Very interesting.

So that’s how it was. They showed us to our room, second floor. Beautiful room. Big canopy bed. It looked like it was the master. One side of the room toward the front, you see the windows onto the front yard. They named the home because of the trees that were planted in the front. Beautiful elms, and on the other side you saw the whole street, so there’s windows on both sides of the room.

We checked in, still light, and we were trying to get ready because one of the best things about staying at a B&B is they do the wine and cheese around 5 p.m. once all the wineries close down. Everyone gathers and you get to meet other people. That’s the fun part. So we changed quickly, went back down. You get to relax, have some wine, have some cheese.

And nobody else was there. It was just my sister and I. We were like, “Okay, I guess no one else has checked in yet.” We were sitting in the living room enjoying ourselves, and right there on the coffee table there was a Haunted Hotels book. I looked at it and I said, “Oh no.” My sister was a bit of a scaredy-cat at the time. I picked it up and said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if this hotel was in this book?” She said, “No, it would not be funny, and I think you would do this on purpose.” I said, “I swear I do not know if it’s in here.” Probably the third hotel that was in there, it was in the book. [laughs]

I closed it really quick because I knew my sister would get freaked out and I said, “You know what, it’s okay. We don’t have to read that book. Let’s go outside and just enjoy the sunset.” So that’s what we did. We relaxed for about a half hour and then we said, “Let’s get ready for dinner.” Went back upstairs, changed for dinner. It gets a little cold in November in wine country, so you have to bring a jacket.

We went back out, said goodbye to the hosts, walked about two blocks on Main Street, went to a restaurant, relaxed and ate for about two hours. The sun set, and as we’re eating, in the back of my mind I’m like, “Oh no, we’re going to have to go back to this house and no one’s there. It’s just going to be us and it may be haunted. What’s in for us tonight?” I know my sister was thinking the same thing. We didn’t really talk about it.

We walked back to the house and the porch light was on, the downstairs light was on; the rest of the house was dark. I made it a point before we left to keep the hallway light on because I knew possibly there might not be anyone at the home when we get there. We walked back up to our room, which was on the second floor, and wouldn’t you know it, the light was off. And it was pitch black. I was like “Oh no!” My sister’s like, “You need to find the light.” She was freaking out at this time. She was really scared. I was like “All right, don’t worry. I’ll find the light.”

I went and found the light, flicked it on. We hurried, we got into the room, closed the door, and she was like, “I’m not really getting a good feeling about this.” I said, “It’s going to be okay.” At this time it was about 9:30. It was dark outside. I’m like, “Let’s just get a good night’s sleep. We’ll get ready for tomorrow. It’s going to be fine.” So we both changed. We were getting ready for bed. I did keep one light on. I was a little bit like, “Hmm, I don’t know if I want to sleep all the way in the dark in here.”

As soon as we hit the bed, this weird noise was happening in the corner of the room. I attributed it in the beginning to the house settling. Old wooden homes settle and they creak. I’m like, “Okay, what is this?” It felt like a shifting of weight, like a creak… creak. It was like a slow creak happening in the corner by the TV, like a constant, slow shifting of weight. That’s how we went to bed. My sister was like, “This is too much for me. I’m going to take a sleeping pill and go to bed,” because she was that freaked out. I was like, “Okay, you do what you do and I’ll go to bed.” So she passed out.

And the creaking kept happening. And then as the night went on, Jim, the room just kept getting hotter and hotter. I got up – I had flannel pajamas because wine country gets 40 degrees at night in the winter. So I’m taking off my pajamas and I went to the heater and I’m like, “Oh, the heater must be on” because it felt like it kept kicking on. But it wasn’t. It was totally off. I was like, “Let me open some windows, let some fresh air in here.” And it just kept getting hotter and hotter as the night went on and more uncomfortable.

It must’ve been, I don’t know, 12:00 by this time. This had been going on for a couple hours. I tried to turn over on my stomach. Being on my back was uncomfortable. It felt like – I don’t want to say it felt like someone was in the room, but it just felt very awkward, and then the creaking was still happening. So I turned over, and I guess I was about to fall asleep, and I felt two hands on my shoulder. It shook me almost off the bed. It felt like I was lifted off the bed. Just shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, like “Hey!” Real urgency.

I was jarred awake, and then at the same time, my sister turned over, still asleep, and she said and spoke in her sleep, “Oh, they’re squeezing my head! They’re squeezing my head!”

JIM HAROLD: Oh my lord.

JENNIFER: I was like, “Wake up!” I was trying to elbow her, “Wake up, wake up, wake up!” She wouldn’t. She didn’t wake up, and there I was, about 12:30 at night, just sweating and cold. I think I was cold not from the temperature, but just from the freakout. I turned and I said, “I’m not going to go to sleep. I’m not going to go to bed. I’m just going to turn on the TV and stay up until the sun comes up.”

And that’s pretty much what I did. But the heat kept getting hotter. I kept opening more windows. No more sheets, no more comforter. It was just weird. And you know how some people say, “I feel like someone’s in the room”? There wasn’t exactly that. It just was – I don’t know.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, but the head thing with your sister. It’s like, whoa.

JENNIFER: I know. But she wouldn’t get up.

JIM HAROLD: Would you go back and do further investigation?

JENNIFER: I definitely would. The funny thing is that after that night, the morning when we came down for the breakfast part, when we were about to leave – we packed everything up really quick, and at 7:30 we were downstairs in the breakfast area. There actually were three more people sitting at the table with us. We were surprised; we didn’t hear anyone there.

They were talking really quietly, but overhearing what they were saying, Jim, they were doing an investigation that night at the hotel, and we did not know about it. They were doing a paranormal investigation that evening. We listened. I didn’t say a word. I didn’t want to freak my sister out even more. And then the hostess and the owner came back to us and said, “Yeah, we’re excited for you to stay another night,” and we said, “No, no, it was just one night. We’re not staying another night. You made a mistake.” I didn’t book another night, but they thought we were staying another night. But nope, haven’t been back.

Come to find, doing some research after that time when I went back home, that second floor, actually there was a fire with the original owners on that second floor, and the wife passed away on that second floor. Coincidence? I don’t know. It was really real that night.

JIM HAROLD: Wow. Jennifer, thank you for sharing your trip to haunted wine country, and should you return, I hope you’ll report back.

JENNIFER: I will. Thank you so much, Jim. Stay spooky.

JIM HAROLD: Next up on the Campfire is Oliver from the UK. I always love to hear from our listeners in the UK. They always have such great stories. Oliver and his fiancée moved into a house in 2019, and as you might imagine, some strange things started to happen. He’s going to tell us all about them. Oliver, welcome to the show and tell us what happened.

OLIVER: Thanks, Jim. We moved in end of 2019, and on the first night we were unpacking stuff in the kitchen. We put a jar on the worktop and it just slid across. We looked at each other. She was freaked out. I was quite excited. She was like, “Say nothing about this.” She gets quite scared. I was like, “Okay, I won’t say anything.”

I haven’t seen these things, but she has. The lights will just flicker in different rooms and turn on and off, and even with bedside lamps it does it as well. She was by herself downstairs and she heard a scratching noise that went all the way round the front room, stopped at the door, started at the other side, went all the way round to the window, did the same thing, then to the door and went out.

JIM HAROLD: Wow.

OLIVER: Yeah, she screamed and I ran downstairs. She was quite terrified. I was like, “That’s okay, it’s probably just rats or mice in the walls.” [laughs] Trying to calm her down. And the TV as well. It will turn on. You’ll see it in the corner of your eye when you’re upstairs or in another room, and when you get up to turn it off, it will just turn off before you can get to the front room.

JIM HAROLD: So something’s messing with you.

OLIVER: Yeah. We’ve never had anything malicious, so it’s okay I guess.

JIM HAROLD: The thing about the UK – I know England for sure; I was there. I only got to go once, but I was just – for an American, it’s really eye-opening to see the history. I remember walking into a pub that I think started in the 1600s. Here, if something’s 100 years old we’re like, “Oh, it’s a century home.” And if it’s 100 years old in the UK, it’s like it’s just getting started. It’s just getting broken in. How old was this place? What was the history of it? Do you know?

OLIVER: I don’t know how old it is, but – not the previous owner, before them, I think a woman died here. The old owner. The day she died, her son came and ransacked the whole house looking for jewelry and then just left. Didn’t speak with his family again.

JIM HAROLD: So there’s some bad energy there. Maybe some resentment.

OLIVER: Maybe, yeah. We went in the attic one day and we saw these little slabs of pictures. It looked like she went traveling round a lot, the old owner.

JIM HAROLD: Interesting. You’re still there now, right?

OLIVER: Yeah.

JIM HAROLD: You don’t see much, though, and she tends to see more, it sounds like. Is that right?

OLIVER: No, I’ve seen two more things, which I think are the most – one’s quite scary and the other one was a headscratcher. Don’t know what happened. I was lying in bed and I heard a bottle fall off the work surface. I was like, “I’ll get it in the morning.” I went downstairs because I started 5 a.m. at work. I went downstairs and I opened the door where the cat’s food is, and the bottle was in there. And my fiancée was on night shift, so she wasn’t in the house.

JIM HAROLD: Huh.

OLIVER: I don’t know how that got in there, and I messaged her saying, “Did you come home?” She said no.

Then the last thing is I was walking – we have the behind house parking, and I was walking up to our back door, and I saw in our window a dark silhouette. It slid backwards. You couldn’t see its shoulders moving; it just glided backwards. So I opened the door, and again there was no one in the house. I looked everywhere.

JIM HAROLD: Some people would do an investigation, some people would sage the house. Other people might call in clergy. Do you have any plans to do anything about this, or is it more you’re like “live and let live, it’s not anything malicious, it’s not bothering me”? What are your thoughts?

OLIVER: That’s what we’re doing. Live and let live. Because maybe doing something like that could make it worse, and it’s never hurt us. It’s just turning things on and off, really.

JIM HAROLD: Do you kind of look forward to it?

OLIVER: I do, yeah. I hear something go bump in the night and I’m half-scared and half-excited to see what’s going to happen.

JIM HAROLD: Your better half not so much, though.

OLIVER: Oh no, she doesn’t want anything to do with it.

JIM HAROLD: Well, Oliver, great story. I hope that you’ll keep us updated if anything else strange happens.

OLIVER: Yeah, I will do, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: Thank you for being a part of the Campfire, again all the way from the UK.

OLIVER: Thank you for having me on.

JIM HAROLD: Patty is on the line, and she found out about us from that great podcast, And That’s Why We Drink. Christine and Em are always such great supporters of the show, and actually, congratulations are in order; I understand their new book is on the New York Times Best Seller List. So I can say, “Hey, I know those guys!” I mean, its fantastic.

So we appreciate Christine and Em – and we appreciate Patty. She’s been listening for a little while, but she said, “I’m going to call in with this story,” and this story is about her mom. Patty, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us, and please tell us what happened.

PATTY: Thank you for having me. I guess I should probably start out – my mom fell ill in 2019. She got pancreatic cancer, and then it also ended up being lung cancer, which ended up being Stage IV.

JIM HAROLD: I’m sorry.

PATTY: Thank you. I appreciate it. It was rough, but she had her family with her and we all took care of her. I mostly stopped over every day, three or four times a day, and I took part in taking her to her appointments and things like that. We were very close. We were almost close to the point where we were like sisters rather than mother/daughter, but that’s just how we were.

She would call me if she felt anxious and anything like that, but she kept to herself most of the time. She – sorry, I’m a little nervous just because of the topic.

JIM HAROLD: That’s all right. It’s understandable. Take your time.

PATTY: She was sick for about six months, and she ended up going to the hospital and passing there. Half of our family, one of my brothers stayed with me when my mom was in the hospital, and my dad and my other brother went up to Chicago because she was planning to get life flighted out there. She eventually passed after a few hours, but the whole time I was holding her hand and talking to her because the nurses told me that that was important, that somebody talk to her the whole time. They said most people that come out of things like that can hear you. So I did.

And I took it pretty hard after she passed away. I kind of had a bit of a breakdown. I would wake up – it was weird because I would wake up at five or six in the morning every morning, and instinctually I would just cry. As anyone would who’s missing a parent or a loved one, would ask “Why?” I’m also a very spiritual person, so I would talk out loud and I would say, “I hope you’re okay. I miss you and I hope everything’s okay.” That continued for a few days, and it was weird because I just kept getting up, and my instinct was to run to the bathroom and lock myself in.

Come the day of her funeral, we said our goodbyes to everyone, all the family, and then after, we had a dinner with our extended family. I talked to my grandma and my other extended family. We went to my brother’s house for a smaller gathering just because no one really knew what to do after that. We were all kind of distraught. So we all stayed up and talked about her. I ended up staying the night there. My oldest brother left my other brother’s house that night because he said he had something to do the next day.

So I went to bed, and I woke up, the same way I had been waking up for that whole week. I jumped up because I felt like I was upset, but also, to the left of me, when I was in his spare bedroom, there were two air mattresses on the ground. I was on one of them, and I heard somebody sit down on one of them. I thought, “That was strange.” It kind of snapped me out of it. I didn’t see anything, but I was hearing my mom’s voice – but it was like it was from a room across the house and she was trying to talk loud to me.

She was saying things, but it was like a very sad tone, like she was upset. That day I wrote it down because I didn’t want to forget anything. But to sum it up, she was saying, “I love you, and everything is okay, and I’m okay now, and I want you to be okay. I’ll always be here, and if you ever want to tell me anything, you just say a prayer and I’ll be here.” And then she started to talk about – it was not things that I would think of myself, but she continued to say “Make sure you’re taking care of your dad.” Before my mom had gotten sick, my dad had a stroke. He was on a very strict diet and he was not allowed to drink.

She said, “Thank you so much for taking care of me. I knew you were taking care of me and I knew you were there the whole time.” I’m assuming she was referring to the hospital. “I knew you were holding my hand. I wish I could stay, and I wish I could hug you. I want you to take care of everyone like you took care of me.”

I also heard her say, “Make sure” – I’m not going to say his name, but my oldest brother – “goes tomorrow.” I’m thinking, okay, I don’t know what that means. And then she also said, “I wish I could stay. God is real. Heaven is real. You can see the stars from heaven. It’s so beautiful, and I’ll see you one day in heaven.”

JIM HAROLD: Wow.

PATTY: Yeah. And then I didn’t hear anything, and I felt this huge tremor, and I felt like the room shook. It was very strange. And when that happened, the spare bedroom that I was in, the door was open, and there was a hallway light on. And it flickered for like a minute straight, and then it just went back on.

JIM HAROLD: Wow.

PATTY: Yeah, it was very strange. And then after that, I got up and I went to the bathroom to lock myself in. I locked the door and I closed it – the door popped right open. No one was up in the house. I don’t know how that happened, but it flew open.

JIM HAROLD: Very interesting.

PATTY: I kind of think that was my mom telling me, “It’s okay. Don’t cry.”

JIM HAROLD: I can assume from the tone of your voice you got a lot out of that. It seems like it provided you a lot of comfort.

PATTY: It did. I spoke to my brother the next day because I wanted to – I didn’t know what that was. Nobody expects to experience something weird like that or wants to talk about it right when it happens because you’re like, “Am I crazy? Did that really happen?” So I talked to my oldest brother about it because he’s very spiritual, and I said, “This is what I heard about going tomorrow. did you go somewhere today?”

He said he had been having stomach problems, and he went to the doctor that next morning. But he was known for cancelling his doctor’s appointments. My mom had not gone to the doctor until they diagnosed her.

JIM HAROLD: So she wanted to make sure that he got taken care of in case there was something serious.

PATTY: Yeah, and he ended up having – it’s still not great, but he had ulcers and he was stressing himself out. But I think it was just a message that she wanted us to take care of us now.

JIM HAROLD: Patty, I really appreciate it. I think these stories are so important for people to hear. Pretty much everybody out there has lost someone at one time or another, and I think when people like you are courageous enough to share their stories and their experiences, it can help other people. I thank you for doing that and being a part of the Campfire tonight.

PATTY: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

JIM HAROLD: Thanks so much for tuning in to this edition of the Campfire. I certainly appreciate it, and I hope that you enjoyed it as much as I did. I’d like to thank our storytellers. We appreciate it because without them, there would not be a show. A lot of times people will say, “It’s the first time I’ve ever told anybody that story,” and it is a great honor, and I do appreciate it.

And I would appreciate it, if you have a spooky story – go over to jimharold.com/campfire and sign up. Also, we want to thank all of our great sponsors. Without them, we would not have a show. So please check out their products and services and support them. They support us and support your listenership to this show.

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We thank you for tuning in to the show. We appreciate it, and we’ll talk to you next time. Have a great week, everybody, and as always, stay safe and stay spooky. Bye-bye.

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