A mysterious thing in the closet, ghosts in Las Vegas and more!

This and much more on this week’s edition of Campfire!

-TRANSCRIPT-

CATARINA: So that night I texted my older sister, who used to live in that room, and I just said, “Hey, did you ever notice anything weird going on in the bedroom?” She texted me back and said, “No, I didn’t notice anything weird in the bedroom, but there was something in that closet.”

JIM HAROLD: That’s Catarina from Michigan, and that’s just the beginning of her terrifying tale on this week’s Campfire.

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

JIM HAROLD: Welcome to the Campfire. I am Jim Harold and so glad to be with you, and I think I finally burned off Thanksgiving dinner. It’s been a week [laughs], but I think that I’m finally good. Happy holidays, everybody. If you’re in the States, I hope you had a great Thanksgiving last week and a great kickoff to the holiday season. And the Campfire is the gift that keeps giving because every week, our callers are actually the gift-givers; they give us the gift of great stories… like this one.

Oh boy, we’ve got a story here. Catarina moved into her sister’s bedroom and, well, strangeness did ensue. Catarina’s calling in today from Michigan. We’re so glad to have her. Catarina, please tell us what happened.

CATARINA: Thanks for having me, Jim. Like you said, this all started when I moved into my older sister’s bedroom. The first thing I noticed was that the closet in the bedroom was unusually cold. Most people would sort of write that off as a misplaced air vent, but I can assure you the closet was vent-free. So that was sort of weird, but I didn’t think much of it – until I started coming into the bedroom and finding the light on. I thought, okay, that’s a little weird. But again, didn’t think much of it. Time started to go on, and of course, I started noticing that the light would be on, but now the door was open.

JIM HAROLD: Oh boy.

CATARINA: I was like, okay. I have three sisters, two of which were living with me at the time, so I thought that they were either pulling a prank on me or going into my closet and stealing my clothes without my permission.

JIM HAROLD: [laughs] Oh, sisters wouldn’t do that, would they?

CATARINA: Right. [laughs] Well, this eventually led to a confrontation with them, and they were like, “First of all, we’re not stealing your clothes, but if we were stealing your clothes, don’t you think you would see us wearing them?” I thought that was a good point. So that night I texted my older sister, who used to live in that room, and I just said, “Hey, did you ever notice anything weird going on in the bedroom?” She texted me back and said, “No, I didn’t notice anything weird in the bedroom, but there was something in that closet.”

JIM HAROLD: Interesting. [laughs]

CATARINA: Yeah. So flash forward, weird things keep happening. I keep finding the light on with the door open. I was pretty convinced that it was paranormal; I just wasn’t sure what it was. One night, I had this lucid dream where I was lying in my bed and I could see a little girl in the vent above my bed. She crawled – 

JIM HAROLD: Oh man, okay, let’s not skip over that. You could see a little girl in the vent? Was the vent in the ceiling? Where was the vent?

CATARINA: It was above the bed.

JIM HAROLD: Oh man. Oh gosh. Oh, that’s terrifying.

CATARINA: Yeah. So I could see her in the vent, and she crawled through the vent, down the wall, across the bed, and I saw her run into the closet. At this point I was really freaked out, so I pulled the blankets up over my head and was just shaking in fear, and then suddenly I felt very calm. So I took the blanket down off of my head and I could see a different little girl standing next to my bed. She said, “You can ask me anything.”

So I said what I’d been thinking this whole time: “Are there ghosts here?” She said, “They come and they go.” I said, “Okay, are there demons here?” She said, “No, but they’re attracted to the light.” And at that moment I woke up to the sound of the light in my closet turning on.

JIM HAROLD: Oh man.

CATARINA: That was pretty freaky. A few other things happened. One of the main things that happened was my boyfriend at the time, now husband, was staying the night, and he’d been asleep for hours. I was up typing an essay, and I’m just sitting there; all of a sudden he sits straight up in bed, eyes closed, points directly at the closet, and says, “There is somebody in here!”

JIM HAROLD: Yikes! Oh man, oh man. First the little girl looking through the heat vent at you, now this. Yikes.

CATARINA: And then weird things keep happening, similar things like this, but one of the craziest and scariest things that happened to me while I was staying in that room was – I’ve never experienced sleep paralysis before or after this, but I woke up, and the only way I can describe it is my body was like a magnet to a refrigerator. I could not move on my bed. I was looking around my room frantically, and I could see that the closet light was on and the door was open, and I started to hear these guttural, demonic tongues coming out of the closet. I started shaking.

When I was little, my dad always would tell us, “When you’re scared, you should just pray. God will protect you.” That was always his belief. In this moment, I was trying to protect myself, so in my head, I started praying. Then eventually I could feel my mouth unfreeze, so I was able to start praying out loud, and then eventually I felt the strength in my body to sit up in my bed and I was screaming at my closet, just saying these prayers, trying to get this thing to leave me alone and go away.

When I eventually snapped out of it and came to, I was sitting straight up in my bed, staring into my open closet, and it was as if I’d just snapped out of it, like it wasn’t even a dream. Those are really the main things that happened, the scariest things.

JIM HAROLD: Wow. So were you glad to get out of that room?

CATARINA: Oh my gosh, yes. But – and this is another thing. I’ll make this pretty quick. At the time, my parents had offered for Cory and I to move into their basement apartment in their house, so we were really excited and we kept talking about how we were going to get out of this room, we were going to get away from that closet so it wouldn’t bother us anymore.

We ended up taking a trip, so we were miles and miles away from the house, and the first night that we were there, I had a dream that I was back in that bedroom. It was one of those lucid dreams again where I could move around, and I woke up in my dream – I could hear knocking coming from somewhere in the house. So I went out of my bedroom and walked down the stairs, and I could hear that the knocking was coming from the basement. Sure enough, I turned the corner and the basement light was on and the door was open.

Again, I started praying, and as I was praying every step I took down the staircase, I turned the corner, and when I turned the corner I could see three demonic figures, one leaning against the wall, one sitting in a chair, and one lying on the ground. At the time I said “Amen,” all three of them said “Amen.”

I guess I was really freaking out in my sleep because Cory shook me awake and asked me what was going on, and I told him, and he said that even me just having that dream, being miles away and seeing those demonic figures in the basement in that dream, it was almost as if they were saying, “You can’t get away from us. No matter where you move, we’re still going to be following you.”

JIM HAROLD: Here’s a question for you. What do you think was going on with the house? Did you know anything about the history of the house that would’ve lent itself to this kind of activity?

CATARINA: The house was relatively new. It was next to a body of water, so I don’t know if that had anything to do with it. Or – and this is probably most likely what happened – when my cousins and I were little – “little,” probably like 10, 12 – we would always have these seances. We would invite things into the house. We didn’t really know what we were doing, but I always wondered if during one of those sessions, we invited something in.

JIM HAROLD: Hmm. Well, maybe. I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself. Don’t be too hard on yourself. But I wouldn’t say no, I wouldn’t say yes. But wow, that’s scary. That’s scary, scary stuff. It’s one of those things. I’ll tell you one thing, if I saw the girl staring at me from the vent, that would be it. It’d be like, “Okay, I’m sleeping on the couch. That’s it. I’m done.” You’re braver than I am, Catarina. You certainly are.

CATARINA: Thanks. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: [laughs] There’s no question. Well, thank you so much for being a part of the show. We appreciate it, and stay spooky.

CATARINA: Thank you. Stay spooky, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: You know, recently we’ve been featuring some podcasters with their stories, and the latest is Noah from Georgia. He is the host of Real Hauntings Podcast, and we’re so glad to have him on the show. He has a couple of remarkable stories for us, and then he’s going to tell us a little bit about his show. Noah, you were telling me these stories, and the thing I love about the Campfire is I always hear stories I’ve never heard before. There’s always something new, and there certainly is in these two stories. So please tell us what happened.

NOAH: Hey, Jim. Thanks for having me on. One took place when I was about 12 or 13. As you know, sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint memories from when you’re a child, but this one is a very distinct memory. I grew up in a small town in Mississippi, about 15,000 people, and there was a house that my best friend grew up in that was so big that it had an elevator in it, and in the middle of the night it would randomly turn off and on. So that was just the beginning of spookiness in my life, I guess.

We would play this version of hide-and-go-seek where we would turn all the lights off in his room, everybody would go hide; the person that was “It” would come into the room, shut the door, it’d be completely pitch-black dark. Everybody had to stay hidden. So the idea was you would get a little jump scare when you would find somebody. As a 10- to 13-year-old, it was really fun to play that.

So we were playing with his sister and her friend. They were like a year younger than us. I was “It.” I went into the room. I didn’t see anybody immediately, and then I saw one of them take off across the room, running not at me, but near me. This is the part I distinctly remember. I remember going, “Ah!”, making an audible noise, and I was going to be a jerky little 12-year-old and slap them with my hand because they were breaking the rules, and then my hand went right through them.

JIM HAROLD: Oh man.

NOAH: And much like a tiny Jawa from Star Wars – that’s the best way I can describe it – it turned its head back and looked at me, and it had these reflective, red-tinted eyes, is the best way I can describe it. All four of us in the room screamed. We immediately turned on the lights. It disappeared, went out of the room, and we went to their big playroom, turned on all the lights in that room, and nobody talked about it.

Then fast forward, I don’t know, 20 years from when that happened, before I started my podcast, actually, and I saw that friend. His name is Bill. He used to come to Atlanta every couple years and we’d go to a concert, pre-pandemic. I asked him, “Hey, do you remember that” – and before I could finish, he was like, “The ghost we saw when we were kids? Yeah, me and my sister talk about it all the time.”

So that was pretty crazy because I have a hard time believing that that happened even though it’s my own memory, if that makes sense. To have somebody else verify it, and then for them to say they have somebody else to verify their memory is a little wild to me. But yeah, I played hide-and-go-seek with a ghost Jawa, I guess you could say.

JIM HAROLD: Whoa, that’s crazy. Let me ask you this. What do you think it was? Do you think it was a spirit attached to that house? What do you think?

NOAH: I think that’s a real possibility. There was a lot of personal trauma in that home. His parents had a pretty rocky marriage, I think. I don’t know if that could potentially stir things up. It also was a home that may have even been built by slaves, so of course there could be a lot of trauma attached to that as well. But yeah, just not good vibes at all in that home. And I’m not necessarily a big woo-woo energy/vibe person, but there were moments in that home – that one being the most obvious, seeing a ghost run across the floor – but there were moments in that home where things just felt really off.

He had an older sister who is probably about seven years old than me, and she was actually really big into “witchcraft” – I mean, this was the ’90s, so you’ve got to remember what was in vogue at that time. She would dial up Bloody Mary, tell us these spooky stories all the time, essentially torturing us. So I don’t know if she conjured up some spirit to come play hide-and-go-seek with us or what happened, but yeah, it was a pretty unreal experience.

JIM HAROLD: You had that experience, and then you fast forward – you were telling me just very recently you’ve had an experience you’d like to share. Tell us about that one.

NOAH: Yeah, this one is truly disturbing to me because I experienced it, and it feels – I still see it in my mind’s eye because it’s so fresh. This happened Halloween weekend in Vegas, which would’ve been a couple weeks ago. My wife and I went to the When We Were Young Fest in Vegas. That Thursday night, we went out to Fremont Street, had an absolute blast. That Friday night, we went to The Palms to a Halloween party. It was ’80s-’90s themed. We both went as Beetlejuice, and we both like cosplay, so we painted our faces, did the whole nine. And of course we partied, but nothing crazy.

Then we got back to the hotel room at Mandalay Bay at, I don’t know, maybe 12:30, 1:00, and went to bed. I am a historically light sleeper. I have had bouts of sleep paralysis. I have only ever seen a spider, and it doesn’t happen very often anymore. But I woke up at about 3:00 on the nose and I rolled over, and I saw this child, this boy, staring at me. It was really clear that he was not from this time. It was very clear that he was not alive in the sense that he looked very weathered. He wasn’t truly in color. It was some kind of tone of gray with I would say maybe light color. It wasn’t like he was glowing or anything; I was looking at him as you do at night when your eyes adjust, so take that for what it’s worth.

I immediately closed my eyes really hard, thinking that it was sleep paralysis. But then I rolled over, and I’ve had sleep paralysis enough, I went, “Well, I don’t typically roll over in sleep paralysis.” I was like, “Let me roll back over. It’s not going to be there. It’ll just be a blip,” whatever – and he was still there. That really freaked me out. I did not wake my wife up because she is extremely skeptical, and I knew that wouldn’t be very fruitful, so I rolled back over and I was like, “What am I going to do, what am I going to do?”

I calmed down. I was like, “This is not happening. This is literally in my head.” I rolled back over one more time just to confirm that this isn’t real – and there was this guy standing behind the kid. He had his hand on the kid’s shoulder. He was clearly from the same point of history that this kid was from, also looked very weathered, unalive. I did not feel threatened at all. I felt more like a fish in an aquarium being weathered. I did not try to interact with them at all, either.

I did talk about this on my podcast, and we had a medium on who will guest co-host from time to time; she mentioned that they potentially were from the 1850s, the Mormon era of Las Vegas.

JIM HAROLD: So the clothing looked that old.

NOAH: Yes, exactly. And then I went to sleep. I have heard people say so many times, “I pulled the covers over my head and just went to sleep,” and I never really got that until that moment.

JIM HAROLD: I’d be the same way, like, “Let me out of here!” I was wondering – I was googling it as you were talking – before Mandalay Bay, there was a hotel called Hacienda that was there from 1956 to 1996. But again, if we’re talking 1850s, that’s way before any casinos and all of that. That’s really interesting. So you think it was more of a residual haunting, probably?

NOAH: I think potentially. We all know the recent tragedy at Mandalay Bay. I don’t feel like it was connected to that. It didn’t look like modern spirits. But we also all know that – good lord, enough has happened in Vegas that it could be spirits from anything. But yeah, residual – it honestly just felt like they were like, “Huh, he can see me. Let’s just stare at him some more.”

JIM HAROLD: Wow.

NOAH: But even though it felt “safe,” it was still the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced.

JIM HAROLD: Sounds terrifying. And that comes from someone who has played tag with a ghost. [laughs]

NOAH: Yes. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: Noah, you’ve been very generous sharing your stories, and also, you had me as a guest on your show, so I appreciate that. Give folks a minute or so about the show, what it’s called, where they can find it, and what they can expect.

NOAH: Absolutely. Again ,my name is Noah Daniels. I host the Real Hauntings Podcast. You’ll also hear my two co-hosts, Cat and JJ. The short name is Real Hauntings; the long name is Real Hauntings Real Ghost Stories for search purposes, but if you type in “Real Hauntings” you’ll see the little ghost wearing headphones with a blue background. We started three years ago. Our niche is that we were all skeptics at varying points of skepticism when we started, and over three years you get to really see our journey into either becoming full believers or very much more believers than when we started.

Much like Jim, we have people on to tell their real ghost stories, which I think is a really special thing in the supernatural field to get to hear from the people who experienced these hauntings themselves. We’re eyeing a million downloads. It’s been a crazy experience. And yeah, it’s been a lot of fun. Thank you, Jim, so much for having us on the Campfire.

JIM HAROLD: Well, everybody check out Real Hauntings. Noah, thank you for joining us and for sharing your stories, and stay spooky.

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JIM HAROLD: You remember a while back, Renee was on the line and she told a very poignant story about her mom and the fact that they continue to have communication, though her mom has passed. Today she’s going to tell us something kind of frightening. Actually, two stories that I think fit well together; one happened to her in the Army and the other while she was in college, and she’s going to share them. Renee, welcome back to the show. Good to speak with you again. Thank you for your service to the country, and please tell us these stories.

RENEE: Thank you so much for having me again, Jim. I was in the military, I was in the Army back in – this was before I went to Iraq, so this is probably 2003 when this happened. I was stationed in Vilseck, Germany. A lot of people know about barracks; they kind of are similar to college dorms, but you have a bathroom in your room, usually have a roommate. They’re larger than college dorms, at least in this particular barracks we were in. I don’t know the history. I know obviously Germany is very old and has a lot of history, and we were in Bavaria, so Southern Germany / Southeastern Germany, I believe.

To set this up, a few friends and I were hanging out. We were watching movies. After we were doing watching movies, one of my friends had passed out. We had a couch; he fell asleep on the couch, and then my roommate went to bed. She was in her bed and I was on the other side of the room in my bed. I was woken up in the middle of the night – I have no idea what time it was. It was pretty late, or early, depending on how you look at that.

But I was woken up because I heard a voice, someone speaking. I woke up, I sat up, I looked at my friend, and I said, “Tony, what are you talking about?” He didn’t say anything. He was sleeping. He was actually snoring, and my roommate was completely asleep. It was a male voice that I heard. My roommate was a female. I looked towards the foot of my bed and I saw a man. He was wearing our current Army uniforms. They were the green camo.

JIM HAROLD: So it wasn’t like a historic uniform. This was the one the Army was wearing at that time.

RENEE: Correct. And he was African-American, he was bald, and he was rummaging through some things. I had a desk at the foot of my bed, pushed up against the wall, and then next to it was a dresser with a TV on it. He was rummaging through things. I looked at him and said, “Who is in my room?” I was angry.  I was physically angry, like, “Who got in my room?” Because we lock our doors, and these particular barracks, we had a key fob like you would have for your car, and you hit the button and it unlocks. So they’re electronic.

I said, “Who got in my room?” Literally, I stood up. He walked towards my bathroom, which was towards the door, and I got up and was like, “Who is in my room?” I started talking to him.  He walked towards the bathroom. I got up and followed. I went into the bathroom, flipped on the light. There was no one in there. I went to pull open the door, assuming that it was unlocked. It was not; it was locked, so I had to unlock it. I opened the door and looked up and down the hallway. There was nobody there. I was like, “Okay, that just happened.” I locked the door and I went back to bed. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: So he just disappeared.

RENEE: Yeah, he completely disappeared.

JIM HAROLD: Wow. Do you think it was some kind of energetic imprint from maybe somebody that lived in that barracks before?

RENEE: It could’ve been. We currently had people from our unit deployed to Iraq, so it is possible that there was something. But I heard him speak, and that’s why I woke up, but then he was just going about whatever he was doing.

JIM HAROLD: And you had the sense he didn’t know you were there?

RENEE: No, he didn’t acknowledge me at all when I was speaking. There was nothing. He just walked the other way and completely disappeared.

JIM HAROLD: That reminds me of a story that Loyd Auerbach, the great parapsychologist, told on our show. I’ve told this various times, so if you’ve heard this before, I apologize. But basically he told the story of he had done a segment for an old TV show called Sightings that some of you might remember years ago, and it was about this place where this murder happened. He went and investigated it and did a segment for the TV show because people were claiming that they were seeing the murder replayed.

Well, that would fit in the line of paranormal thinking that that could happen, but it was the person that got murdered, who was obviously gone – thus the definition of murdered – but then the murderer, who had been convicted, was in prison. He was still alive and they were seeing a replay. I think there’s this big thought that every time you see a ghost, it’s got to be a dead person, and maybe sometimes it’s an energetic imprint.

The other thing that we’ve heard time and time again is when you have this energetic imprint, it is because of just that, energy, when there’s lots of emotional energy. I would think somebody serving at wartime in a barracks, there could be a lot of emotion going on, a lot of emotional energy.

RENEE: There is, absolutely.

JIM HAROLD: So maybe somehow that imprinted and that’s why you saw that gentleman. Very interesting indeed. Not quite what you expect from the story. You expect to hear that he was wearing older – maybe he was stationed there in the ’50s or something, when the U.S. was occupying Germany of those kinds of things after the war. But wearing the current combat fatigues or whatever it was, that’s interesting.

Now, you had another story. You seem to have a way of attracting these or some strange things. Something kind of similar – not exactly, but kind of similar – happened in college, after the Army, right?

RENEE: Yes. After I got out of the Army, I went back to school to finish my degree and I ended up staying in the dorms. I went back to the same school that I had attended before joining the Army, but I was in a different upperclassmen dorm this time. I did have a roommate.

This one is extremely frightening. My roommate and I had talked about it, saying, “There’s weird things happening.” She would tell me that I had spilled my water. My bed was up on a loft and I had this little squishy memory foam couch thing underneath it, just saving space, and she had said that she saw my water cup fall over in the middle of the night and it wouldn’t stop streaming down and falling onto the floor. She told me about it in the morning. There was no water anywhere and my cup was full, so we thought maybe she had a dream.

One particular day I had come home between classes to the dorm. Wanted to take a nap, as you do in college. [laughs] So I was like, “Okay, I’ve got an hour and a half before my next class. Let me just lie down.” It was probably 12:00, 12:30 in the afternoon, so daylight. I lay down on that little squishy couch that I had underneath my loft. When you lie on it, it’s memory foam, so it squishes down. I was lying there. We had the blinds shut but light still comes in.

I don’t know if I had fallen asleep – I’d probably fallen asleep. I felt this intense pressure on my chest, and I could not move. I was trying to move my head. I was able to move my eyes. I have never had sleep paralysis before. This sounds like your average sleep paralysis; I don’t know if this is what it was. But I looked, and there was a shadow figure sitting on me.

JIM HAROLD: Man. Wow.

RENEE: Yeah. It was so dark, and it almost looked like a cloud of smoke, like you could see it moving, but it was in this form of a man sitting on me. And I was terrified. I could not move. It turned its head and looked at me with glowing red eyes. I can still see it in my mind’s eye. I can still picture this happening. The light in the room dimmed and it got darker and darker, and he’s looking at me, and I feel this intense pressure on my chest. I feel myself getting pressed down into the couch. I’m trying to move, trying to move, and all of a sudden it just disappears. I wake up.

JIM HAROLD: Oh my goodness.

RENEE: Yeah. I wake up or I am able to move now, but as I’m doing this, I know I am 100% awake because I am freaked out. I am moving, but I feel the couch decompressing underneath me like this huge weight had been lifted off the couch. So I know that it was something physical sitting on me, on my chest. Oh my gosh, it was so frightening. I got up, grabbed my books, and I booked it out of that room so fast.

JIM HAROLD: Wow.

RENEE: It was probably the most frightening experience I’ve had.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, I’ve got to tell you, that is frightening if you think about it. It’s one of those things where – just ooh. [laughs] I don’t know what else to say. Just frightening. I know your mom had her experience and you’ve had these experiences, plus you told me you’ve had many more that we could talk about another time, but do you think that you, and by extension maybe your family, are just really tuned in?

RENEE: It’s very possible. I have so many stories from my family, not just from myself, but from the other female members of my family on my mom’s side that I could probably talk to you for hours about them. I believe that we have something. I’m not completely tuned into it; I can’t make things happen or I can’t go into a haunted house and say, “Oh yeah, I know this guy is here and he’s been dead for X amount” – I’m not a medium, I’m not a psychic. I don’t feel that in any way. I just feel that we have something. [laughs] If that makes any sense at all.

JIM HAROLD: Well, thank you for sharing that something with us, Renee, and again, thank you for your service to the country.

RENEE: Thank you so much, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: Michael is on the line from New York. He was on the show a few years ago and had a very, very interesting, interesting story for us. He is back with another one, and he said his wife Crystal – by the way, Crystal, stay spooky and thank you for listening. I know you listen to every episode. But basically, what happened is that they were listening to one of our episodes and said, “Hey, that sounds just like Michael’s story.” So Michael’s going to share it right now. Michael, welcome back to the show. Thank you for joining us. Please tell us what happened.

MICHAEL: Thanks for having me, Jim. This story happened when I was in college about 20 years ago or so. It was at SUNY New Paltz. New Paltz is a town about an hour and change north of New York City. My girlfriend and I at the time were up late, as you do in college. You’re up late. She lived on the second floor of this building. It was a three-floor building, a dormitory. We’re up late and we hear the resident above us – her name was Kerry – we hear somebody moving furniture. We’re like, “Why is Kerry moving her furniture at midnight?” We just shrug it off. It’s college, people do things at weird times of night, whatever. So we just shrug it off.

We hear it again a few more times, less than five times but enough for us to say, “Next time we see her, we’ll ask her.” We run into her at some point and we’re like, “Kerry, what are you doing moving furniture? We hear you rearranging your room all the time. What are you up to?” She’s like, “Nope, I haven’t changed my room at all. It’s been the same setup all semester.” We doubt it. There’s a unique sound of furniture being dragged on college dormitory tile floors. It’s a very unique sound. It’s not pipes creaking or wood bending or houses adjusting. It’s a unique sound. We’re like, “No.” She swears she hasn’t done it.

We said, “Last Saturday we heard it at this time. What were you doing?” She’s like, “Last Saturday I wasn’t even here.” She’d gone home that weekend. She wasn’t even in her room. She lived by herself; she was a resident assistant, and RAs had their own room. She was in a room by herself. No one was there. So how were we hearing this when no one was in the room? We play it off and we keep moving on with our lives.

Couple weeks later, in the same timeframe of this – it’s not too terribly long further – my ex-girlfriend and I – again, she was a resident assistant – we’re down on the first floor in the office of this building. It’s 1:00 a.m., 1:30 a.m. The building is quiet because it’s the middle of the week. It’s not a weekend. It’s Monday or Tuesday night. And we hear the same sound again above us. We’re on the first floor; we hear it on the second floor. We’re like, “Someone’s moving furniture. Let’s go find out what this is. We’ll finally solve this.”

We run up to the second floor – again, 1:00 a.m. – nothing. There’s nothing going on. The doors are all shut. Everyone’s quiet, school night. We can’t figure it out. As we’re on the second floor, we hear it again above us on the third floor. Run to the stairwell, run upstairs, go to the third floor. Nothing. Nothing above us. We’re walking around, we can’t see it, can’t hear anything. No evidence. At that point we hear this furniture noise above us while we’re on the third floor. Keep in mind it’s a three floor building. There’s nothing above us at all except the roof. So why are we hearing furniture moving above us again when there’s nothing up there except shingles? It’s roofing. There was no storage up there, there was no attic space. There was nothing above the third floor of this dorm.

So we chased this noise from the first to the second, we’re up on the third, and we hear it above us again on the third. It was wild. We went outside and we looked up at the roof as best as we could, but you can’t see much; 30 feet up, and it’s at night. But nothing was indicating what was up there. At that point it was real. We could explain away everything else and say “maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that.” Once we heard it above us from the third floor, at that point we were like, “Oh boy, this is something crazy.”

To need the story, this particular dorm – I think a lot of college campuses have this story, there’s a dorm where a student killed themselves or something like that. This was that dorm at that campus, where a student, according to the story, had killed herself 15-20 years earlier or something like that. There’s no confirmed story of that, but as I said, I think most college campuses have that legend. But this was the one as well.

As for the context of it, don’t know anything much more, but it was a wild experience. One of those things that you remember 20 years later and it’s still something to think about and wonder about.

JIM HAROLD: Well, it goes to what we talked about when we’ve talked previously. The world is a very mysterious place, and it manifests in some very mysterious ways. But I love when we see these stories that have similar themes because it just verifies the reality of these experiences and the authenticity.

MICHAEL: It does.

JIM HAROLD: Michael, thanks to you and thanks to Crystal, and you both stay spooky. Thanks for being a part of the Campfire.

MICHAEL: We will. You too. Thanks, Jim.

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JIM HAROLD: Emileigh is on the line from Tennessee. We’re so glad to speak with her. She’s going to take us back to her childhood, when she lived in a haunted house. Emileigh, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us. I know you’ve been listening for about a year. You said you started listening at Halloween last year and you never stopped, and that’s the way it’s supposed to work. Emileigh, welcome to the show. Please tell us your story.

EMILEIGH: Thanks, Jim. I grew up in a little town called Athens, Tennessee, about 30 minutes from where I live now. When I was about two years old, my parents bought a lovely little fixer-upper. [laughs] We’ll call it a fixer-upper. I lived there till I was about 13 years old. The weird thing is that you have all these experiences, and typically you know that they’re happening, but it didn’t actually click with me till I was an adult that all of these were not normal things that happened as a kid.

My bedroom, the way the house was set up – it was built in the late ’50s, and there was an addition added. My parents’ and my brother’s room was upstairs in the addition. I was the only one downstairs. I would have I guess a shadow man looking through my window every night.

JIM HAROLD: Oh man.

EMILEIGH: Yeah. That started happening, I guess consciously started happening, when I was probably six, seven, and I would not sleep looking at my window. I would have to keep my back to the window because it just would stand there. With the house being built so long ago, the windows were up high, so it had to have been a pretty tall figure. I would have moments of sleep paralysis as well where I would consciously lie there and think, “I need to call for somebody,” but I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t do anything.

JIM HAROLD: Oh man.

EMILEIGH: There were a few times I was able to call out, and I would make my dad go check around the house outside and there would be no one there, no evidence of anybody being there. It was just nothing.

JIM HAROLD: You talked about that shadow person. So there was no indication that was a real person? You don’t think that was a real person.

EMILEIGH: No.

JIM HAROLD: The thing about sleep paralysis, I always associate that with maybe someone in adulthood when they’re dealing with something like sleep apnea or something, but not with children. I’m sure it’s possible with children, like physiologically, but it’s not something that you usually assume and say that happens to kids.

EMILEIGH: Yeah. It was really weird and I never really put it together till I think I was an adult one day, talking about something, and I was like, “Wait a minute, this happened to me.”

JIM HAROLD: Wow.

EMILEIGH: There was one time it was dark and I went out to the car to get something out – and this happened for years, so I was probably 10 – went out to the car to get something, and out of the corner of my eye I saw another shadow figure go from one tree to another tree. There weren’t a lot of trees because we were in a neighborhood. But it was so real that I hid in the car and watched it, but no one ever came back out, anything. It was just like a stalker kind of feel.

JIM HAROLD: Oh my.

EMILEIGH: It was so weird. And another time – I mean, this house was riddled. My cousin was staying the night, and my room was close to the kitchen. Like normal 10- or 11-year-olds, we were staying up way too late, playing with whatever we were playing with, and we heard the back door open, the screen door open, and someone walk into the kitchen. Now mind you, this is like midnight. My parents are asleep, my brother is asleep. We hid, but then nothing ever came of it. There was nobody there. We checked like 20 minutes later and nothing. So we heard someone come into the house.

JIM HAROLD: Man, that’s frightening. To me, one of the most frightening things is this idea where it’s not a situation where you know it’s a ghost. I mean, it’s almost a situation where it sounds like it’s a flesh-and-blood person, which in some ways, to me – especially if you’re talking about kids and stuff – that’s scarier than a ghost. Because a ghost generally is not going to do you any physical harm. But a real person can. So that thing that happened at night and then this, that’s kind of scary when you’re like, “Is this a flesh-and-blood person?”

EMILEIGH: Yeah, and the fact that you see it and you hear it, but then it doesn’t come back. It basically disappeared behind a tree. A person couldn’t have done that.

Let’s see. Oh, I had – how do I explain this? You know Alien vs. Predator, the movie? I had this reoccurring nightmare up until we moved out of the house, at least two or three times a week, that the Alien – that’s the closest thing I could associate it to – the Alien would come into my bedroom and try to get me. It was the same thing. He would walk into the room, I’d hide under the bed, and as soon as I would jump out from under the bed, in my dream, I would get out of the bedroom right when my dad started to board up the door and the Alien would start to claw through the door and the boards, and I’d wake up, every single time, right before it got us.

JIM HAROLD: Oh my lord.

EMILEIGH: That went on for eight years, maybe, and then I moved out and never had it again.

JIM HAROLD: Huh, that’s interesting. And again, you were very young, but did you have any sense of the history of the house or what went on there that may have led to this?

EMILEIGH: I didn’t. I know that it was in rough shape when my parents bought it and we worked really hard on remodeling it. I know I’ve heard in the past that some ghosts don’t like you remodeling their house. [laughs] But this doesn’t feel like that. It was built in the ’50s, it was added on. When we sold it, we sold it to someone my mom worked with. It never even made it to the market. It was just like, “Hey, we’re selling our house” and they came and bought it. She was nice and they were great, and then the house got foreclosed on because she became a drug addict in a few years. The weird vibe of the house, I almost associate that with that as well. Treehouse in the backyard burned down.

JIM HAROLD: Oh my.

EMILEIGH: Yeah. There was never really anything – I don’t know. I couldn’t find anything that had anything to do with the house.

JIM HAROLD: But it seemed like it was almost a cursed kind of place.

EMILEIGH: Yeah. It just had a weird vibe to it.

JIM HAROLD: Interesting. Well, I’m glad you got out of there, Emileigh.

EMILEIGH: Thank you.

JIM HAROLD: Thank you so much for sharing your story. I appreciate it, and thank you for being a part of the Campfire tonight.

EMILEIGH: Thank you.

JIM HAROLD: Next up is Janene from Louisiana. You’ll remember a while back she had that very powerful story about the premonition that she had about a friend’s passing. She has another powerful story for us about someone who had passed. Janene, thank you for joining us again from Louisiana. We appreciate it, and please tell us this story.

JANENE: Hi, Jim. I’m so happy to be back. Thank you again for inviting me back. Yes, that story was powerful about my friend, and even though this is not a premonition of a death, it is a visitation by a person who had passed a few hours before.

A little bit of a preface, I’ve been told by multiple psychics that I’m what’s called a gatekeeper. I’m meant to move souls through, I’m meant to show them the way, which is a lot of responsibility, I think. [laughs] Even my own father said that to me the night before he passed. I was at his hospital bed, and I told him it was okay to go, and he said, “Show me the way.”

This particular night, I’m back in Cincinnati. I had moved from Baton Rouge back to Cincinnati, and I had bought this house on a small cul-de-sac and I had a large ravine behind the house. This night, my husband and I were asleep. The bedroom was on the top floor of the house. I’ve heard this mentioned on your show, waking up at 3:00 a.m. As far as I can remember, I’d always wake up at 3 a.m. Still do. But this time I was woken by a strong feeling of anxiety and fear and a crushing sensation in my body. It was so palpable I thought I was having some type of physical event, so I sat up gasping, and I looked to my right. My husband was fine. He was asleep.

Standing next to the bed was a young man with dark hair, wearing tan pants, and he was holding a motorcycle helmet in his hand. It was tucked against his body. I screamed, which then woke my husband up, and the young man disappeared.

The next morning when I was at work, I had the overwhelming urge to call my friend in Baton Rouge. She answered the call and I said, “I’m not sure why I had the need to call you right now, but I felt this strong need to reach out to you.” She said, “I just found out my nephew Hunter was killed in a motorcycle accident last night.” I told her about what happened the night before, seeing him by the bed, and she said, “He was seeking your help to cross him over.”

JIM HAROLD: Wow. With this and the other call, it’s pretty clear that you’re tuned in. Does that all continue to this day?

JANENE: Yes, it does.

JIM HAROLD: How do you feel about it?

JANENE: I’ve learned to control it. I’ve learned to set boundaries, I should say. After years of being poked and touched and things coming at me – my poor husband, all the nights he’d have to grab me out of the air because I was trying to fly over him, things were coming at me. Groups of people, individuals. But these are the ones I had a special personal connection to. But yeah, it still does. I’ve just learned to set those boundaries and literally turn off the “open” sign and rotate it to the “closed” sign. “I’m not open for this right now.”

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, because I always wonder if that’s something – and I’ve heard different psychics say it differently. Different ones have different opinions. Some say they can turn it on and off; others say it’s a little bit harder. But very interesting indeed. Janene, thank you again for sharing this, and please come back on the show and tell us more about these events as they happen.

JANENE: I sure will. Thank you so much, and have a great, wonderful rest of your day.

JIM HAROLD: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. You know, there were times in my life, and there have been times in my life, when I had wished that life came with a user manual – for example, when my mom and my uncle, who was very close to me, died within two weeks of each other. In addition to the overpowering grief, there were all the logistics of figuring out what to do and how to help my elderly father – going into their property and figuring out where everything was, and aside from tactically doing those things, just figuring out how to process it.

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You’re listening to Jim Harold’s Campfire.

JIM HAROLD: Sarah is back. You remember a while back she had that headscratcher about a talking toy telephone, and today she’s back with a poignant story – a story about her father. Sarah, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us.

SARAH: Thanks so much for having me back. I’m glad to be able to tell this story. It’s quite a bit different than the last story I shared, but it’s really something that stuck with me. Almost two years ago, about a year into the COVID pandemic, unfortunately we lost my father to COVID. It was, of course, extremely sad, hard to cope with. We were all very distraught.

JIM HAROLD: Of course. I’m sorry.

SARAH: Yeah. It was pretty fast, so it wasn’t a long-drawn-out time in hospice or anything. It was pretty fast and we weren’t able to talk to him a whole lot the last parts of his life. Thankfully, we were able to be there with him, which a lot of people in the same situation as us didn’t get, so we’re very thankful for that.

The first part of the story happened about maybe a week or two after he passed. I’m the kind of person who’s quite a realist. I believe in logic and science. I trust my instincts, but I don’t really go off on tangents a lot. If something occurs to me, I’ll put it on a list and prioritize it and do things in a certain order that makes sense. I’m not really an impulsive person, I guess is what I’m trying to say.

This day, about a week or two after we lost him, I was at my home. I was walking through my master bedroom to go to my bathroom to do something. I don’t remember what it was. And all of a sudden, this overwhelming idea entered my head, and it was this urge that I just could not stop thinking about and I just had to follow. What it was is this sudden memory came into my head of a Christmas card that my father had given me 20 years prior, when I was in college, and I had for some reason kept it. I had put it in my lockbox that was in the bathroom that I was heading towards.

Like I said, it was just this overwhelming urge to go look at it, which is very unusual for me. I immediately booked it straight into the bathroom. I dug out the lockbox, I opened it up, and I opened the card. I found it, thank goodness. In his own handwriting, which was unusual for him – he had Parkinson’s and it was hard for him to write, so this was in his own handwriting – I open up the card, and inside the card it says, “Merry Christmas. I love you. Dad.” It really felt at that moment like he was there, guiding me to go look at that so he could give me that message. It’s so special to have in his own handwriting. I’m actually sitting here looking at it right now. It’s very special for me.

The second part of this story happened a few months later. I work in health care. I’m not a nurse or a clinical staff member; I help in admin. But during the pandemic, I went in and helped as much as I could in the hospital. I’d go help clean ED rooms and run supplies to people and stuff. Through part of that work, which I really tried to do a lot of after losing my dad as a way to give back, I had a pair of safety goggles that we wear during the pandemic over our eyes to prevent the virus from getting in our eyes to infect us.

I had a pair of those, and at the time, supplies were really hard to find, so the last time I had worked in the ED, I had brought those home with me and set them on my shelf because I figured anything that was on there would be dead by the time I used them again, and then I could take them again and I wouldn’t have to get new ones. They sat on the shelf in my master bedroom for probably four or five months. They just sat there. They never moved. I never moved them. I kind of forgot about them.

Maybe six or seven months after losing my dad, I was again walking into my master bedroom, about the same exact spot I was in when I had that overpowering urge to go look at the Christmas card. My husband was in the bathroom right in front of me, but he hadn’t just walked in; he’d been in there for a few minutes brushing his teeth. As I’m walking towards the bathroom door, all of a sudden those safety goggles fly off the shelf and land on the floor several feet away. They had not moved; you could still see the dust. There was nothing in there that would have created a draft. The window was closed. We did have our ceiling fan on, but the ceiling fan has been on for five years straight. We don’t turn it off because it clicks when we turn it off. There was nothing else. We hadn’t just walked by. I hadn’t moved my arms or flapped my hands or dropped anything.

I just sat there and looked at it and I was like, “Hi, Dad.” It really felt to me in that moment like it was my dad coming back, and he knew that I associate him with COVID. For good or bad, that is something that I would see and connect with him, and it felt like he was there to say hi. So I just said, “Hi, Dad!” And I called my husband in to say, “What in the world just happened here? I can’t explain this.” I’ve never had anything like that happen. It just leapt off that shelf and landed right on the floor in front of me. So yeah, he’s around.

JIM HAROLD: I believe that. I believe that our loved ones visit us in different ways, and in ways that are meaningful to us. I’ve always said that because I’ve had that experience that strange things that have happened to me, but anybody else they wouldn’t mean anything to, but because of the context they mean something to me. So I think that they know what we’ll get sometimes, what we’ll understand, and they present that thing to us.

SARAH: Yes, absolutely.

JIM HAROLD: Well, Sarah, again, my sympathies. I know you and so many have lost loved ones during this pandemic. Sometimes I think while we’re all trying to get on with our normal life, we kind of forget that. Millions have lost their lives. So my heart goes out to you and all the families affected by this pandemic, and thank you for sharing this very personal story on the Campfire.

SARAH: Thanks so much.

JIM HAROLD: Maddy is on the line from Ohio, another Ohioan. We’re getting into the tens of listeners from Ohio. [laughs] It seems like I have more listeners in Australia, Maddy, than I do in Ohio. But so glad when we do get one, and thank you so much for listening. You have a story here that’s kind of a family story, kind of your story. It goes back to your teenage years. Can’t wait to hear it. Thank you so much. Tell us what happened.

MADDY: This took place around 2012. A little background into the story, my aunt rented this house; she’s from Cincinnati, I’m from Toledo, and she rented this house. It was nicknamed “The Robinson Circus House.” This house has a lot of history to it. It was built in 1855 and purchased by John Robinson around 1870.

The Robinsons did have a circus, so they moved their circus and their entourage in with them. They also had animals at the location, numerous animal cages. They also added practice rings, costume shops, and aerobatic arenas to the property just to give it that circus feel. They mainly used the home during the winter months when they weren’t on the road doing the circus. It’s said that the neighbors could even spot the elephants taking baths in the Little Miami River. The house sits right above where that river is. So they had all sorts of crazy things going on there. I’m sure the neighbors loved to peek over and see what was happening that day.

The Robinsons eventually sold the Circus House in 1916, and eventually it absorbed into the Ringling Brothers Circus. I know that’s a pretty well-known circus. The Robinsons, after they sold the circus to the Ringling Bros, kept the elephants because the family loved them so much, especially Tilly. Tilly was well-known in the Cincinnati area. When she did pass away in 1932, they actually had a huge funeral for her. The house had a commemorative T-shaped window added to this house in honor of Tilly. She also has a headstone in front of the house, but where she’s buried remains a mystery.

When my aunt rented this house, she did hear that there were rumors that Tilly was buried in the backyard. We don’t know if that’s true or not or if it’s just one of those myths people like to tell around the town, but definitely interesting.

But where my story begins is my family decided to go visit my aunt since she recently started renting this house. She told us about all its history, so obviously we were really excited to go down there. As soon as we arrive, we get there, the house of course is huge – I mean, it did hold a circus, literally. So we got there; as soon as we walked in, all of her smoke alarms started going off. She had a radio on, and the radio got all fuzzy. The dogs were going crazy. It felt very odd. We obviously asked, “What’s going on? Are you cooking something?” She’s like, “No, I don’t know what’s going on. I’ve never had this happen before.” So it was definitely very eerie as soon as we got there, the feeling to it.

This house has 24 rooms in it, so it’s pretty big. Four stories, which is including a basement. The basement, in my experience there, was probably the creepiest out of everything just because it was one of those older style basements. It even had remnants of cages that were down there and fans for the animals because that’s where they used to keep the lions in the winter months.

So it definitely had a weird, eerie feel to it. The most interesting thing that happened to me is probably what happened to my cousins when they were moving out of that house. That’s mainly all I can say about it – just the house had a very eerie feeling. You didn’t feel very welcomed. I know especially in the basement, I just got the heebie-jeebies and was constantly feeling watched.

Now, a couple years after that, my aunt ended up purchasing a house not too far away from where they were currently staying at the Circus House. They ended up purchasing a house and my cousins – I have four cousins, and the two middle ones are twins. They were around six or seven at this time, and they would experience anything peculiar that would happen. They would cry, saying that they kept getting woken up by “the man in the tall hat,” they kept hearing voices. They would go cry and run to my aunt’s room, where she would have them sleep with her for the night because they were obviously freaked out.

My one cousin had the more interesting side of things. He would actually see things in the house. He would say that he would see the man in the top hat. The thing that remained – still to this day he tells this story, and you know when some people tell a story, you think they’re lying because their story changes a little bit, but his stays the same to this day. He’ll tell the story and he uses the same words. I think it was a week or so before they were moving out, he says he was visited by a man in a top hat and a clown on a unicycle.

JIM HAROLD: Oh my.

MADDY: Yeah, while he was in bed. The man in the top hat looked at him and said, “You all need to leave by Saturday.” And he said, “We’re moving that day.” The man in the top hat replied, “Very well then” and just disappeared. You know that term, “very well then”? You don’t typically hear that. You don’t hear that in today’s terms. He, of course, as a seven year old, didn’t have that type of vocabulary. [laughs]

Definitely very creepy. When I ask him about it, he still does remember it to this day. Yeah, definitely a really interesting house. Its previous owners have decorated it with memorabilia they found on eBay and other sites to make it more that authentic circus feel. It was definitely a really interesting experience visiting there.

JIM HAROLD: It definitely sounds like a very, very interesting place. Thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing that story on the Campfire.

MADDY: Thanks, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: Rene is on the line from Michigan. She was on the show several years ago, and she’s back, and we’re so glad that she is. She has a number of stories, but the one we’re going to focus on for this call is creepy disembodied voices. That sounds creepy to me. Rene, tell us about these disembodied voices, and welcome back to the show. 

RENE: Thanks, Jim. We’ve been living in this house since 2016, and not too long after we moved in, I started noticing weird things that are happening. I started hearing things. Like at nighttime, I’d hear a moan in the hallway in our upstairs room. Then I would hear whispering and what sounded like two little girls talking in our bedroom. We have a spare bedroom. It was just my husband and I. They were talking, and one of them said to the other one, “She’s in there.”

JIM HAROLD: Whoa. [laughs]

RENE: I’m like, okay… I’m listening, and they were talking like – you know when you hear people talking but you don’t really understand what they’re saying? But that was very clear: “She’s in there.”

JIM HAROLD: That’s wild.

RENE: That is wild. Another one, I was lying in bed and just thinking about my day, and somewhere above me, I heard what sounded like a young girl’s voice say, “Hello.” I’m just lying there like, “There’s nobody here but me, but okay, whatever.” It didn’t frighten me but it startled me, I think, more than anything else. So that was another one.

One night – most of this stuff happens and my husband doesn’t hear anything. He’s asleep and I’m lying there in bed, and I turn over, and then I hear somebody saying, “Well, you know.” That was a woman’s voice, completely different. They’re all different voices that I hear, different audio voices. I’m just like, “What? You know what?” That was a weird thing.

Let’s see, what other voices are there? In the same room, not too long after that, a man sneezed, and it wasn’t me and it wasn’t my husband. It was a man’s sneeze. And a sneeze is something you can’t really miss. It’s pretty noticeable, what it is. The other voices are like I’ll hear somebody calling my name and there’s nobody there. Yeah, it’s just some strange oddities that have been happening since we’ve been living here.

JIM HAROLD: And then you also said you had another story about your kitchen. There’s some stuff going on with your kitchen?

RENE: Yes. In fact, I looked at the picture – there was a plate in the cabinet. It’s funny; it’s exactly three years ago today, in 2019, November 1^st, day after Halloween, I opened up my kitchen cupboard and I noticed there was something weird about the plate. There’s two salad plates, one on top of the other one. I went to go grab it and I went, “Whoa, wait a minute.” I pulled the plate out and the top plate was completely shattered. It’s a glass plate. And the one underneath it, which is identical, was perfectly fine.

I got a picture of it. I looked at it just a little while ago. I said, “How can that happen?” It was in the cupboard, undisturbed. We had just used those plates the night before. It was completely shattered. And what it looked like, Jim – if you hit a plate with a hammer, it’s going to go in a million directions and it’s going to scatter everywhere. It looked like somebody hit it with a hammer and reassembled it and put it back in the cabinet. All the pieces were lined up, but it was completely shattered. I still to this day do not have an idea how that happened. That was very, very odd. Still have a picture of the plate. I’m like, yeah, that really happened.

JIM HAROLD: And the history of the house? Do you know the history of the house?

RENE: We bought it from the original owner. He passed away several years ago. The house was vacant for a while, and he might still be here visiting, I don’t know. But that was a weird thing. Another time, not too long – maybe six months ago – I was in the kitchen and opened up a cabinet, and this glass bowl, a little bowl, just flew out. When something falls out of a cupboard, it would fall straight down. It flew out so hard, it smashed my shoulder, smashed the countertop, and then it hit the floor and of course it broke.

But I didn’t even notice till later in the evening and my husband pointed to my shoulder. It was black and blue. He said, “What’s that?” I said, “That’s probably when that thing flew at me.” It was like it was launched out of the cupboard. So that was startling. But it might’ve just fallen. I don’t know how it fell. Things just drop. But you open it, boom. It flew out, hit me in the shoulder.

JIM HAROLD: That’s more like a poltergeist.

RENE: Yeah, it sounded like somebody was really angry and just threw this thing at me. And it was glass, so I’m glad it didn’t hit me in the head.

JIM HAROLD: Wow.

RENE: This one’s kind of a sweet thing. My mother passed away in February 2019. She was 105. We buried her on a Saturday, and then the following Sunday in February, it was just a normal day, we got through the day, and then in the evening around 7:30 I went to the kitchen, and my cat, Chelsea – I laughed and went, “Chelsea, what are you doing?” She had a kitchen towel draped over her back. You can’t put something on a cat and expect them to just leave it on. You can’t. If you know cats, they don’t allow that.

Well, she’s walking through the kitchen from one end to the other with this towel draped across her back like a horse blanket until I saw her and I laughed. I said, “Chelsea, what are you doing?” Then she shook it off. But the towel was on the kitchen counter. I don’t know how that happened. I have a feeling that’s something my mother would do because she was always in the kitchen. I have a feeling if she sent a message, that’s probably how she would do it in a non-scary way.

JIM HAROLD: Very interesting. Very interesting indeed. Rene, I know you have more stories. I hope you’ll come back and tell them to us. I thank you for being a part of the Campfire.

RENE: Thank you so much. It was so good to talk to you.

JIM HAROLD: Ysenia’s been listening for a few years, and now she’s a storyteller. We’re so glad to have her on the show. She says that she has three short stories for us. Ysenia, welcome to the show and please tell us these stories.

YSENIA: Thank you, Jim. The first story is my husband’s. We went to go visit his family in Mexico. He has claimed in the past that he’s always had sleep paralysis when visiting, especially in Mexico. We were sleeping, middle of the night – I don’t even remember what time it was. All I remember is waking up with him mumbling something. I was trying to figure out what he was mumbling, and I felt that he was trying to move but it was like he was unable to move.

I turned around and I touched him with my left hand, and I said, “Hey, what happened? What’s going on? Are you okay?” Next thing I know, my left arm went cold. It appeared he was having sleep paralysis, and whatever was – because in Mexico, or at least what I’ve always heard, sleep paralysis is referred to as se me subió el muerto, which is translated in English to “the dead is on me.”

JIM HAROLD: Ooh.

YSENIA: Whatever he had I believe transferred to the hand that I touched him with to try to wake him up. I asked him when he woke up what happened, what was going on, was he dreaming or something. He said, “I was just trying to wake up. I felt something on my leg coming up. I was trying to talk, I was trying to wake you up to wake me up.” He said he was unable to talk and unable to move. I don’t know exactly what happened there.

JIM HAROLD: That’s frightening. I do believe sometimes that sleep paralysis is known to have a medical cause, but sometimes it seems like there’s something else at play.

YSENIA: Right. So that was one of the stories. The second story happened at home here in Dallas. It was during the school week, so my three boys were at school and my husband was at work. I had the day off from work. Usually it’s pretty quiet. I had finished cleaning up and I wanted to take a nap, so I lay down to try to take a nap when all of a sudden I heard this alarm system that said, “Front door open,” which actually alarmed me because I have no such alarm. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: Oh my. Wow.

YSENIA: “What is this? Is it the neighbor’s alarm?” But I’d never heard it before. So it alarmed me. I lay in bed and I kept thinking about it. I said, “Maybe it’s something trying to let me know to just go ahead and check.” So I got up out of bed and I checked the front door, I checked the back door, checked the windows, everything seemed fine. I don’t know what it was.

JIM HAROLD: Huh. It’s one thing to have an alarm go off for no reason, but to have an alarm go off that you don’t have, that’s really weird.

YSENIA: Right. It said “Front door open.” I don’t know. It was locked.

JIM HAROLD: What was the third one?

YSENIA: The third one also happened at home. We were finishing up dinner, so it was at night. My boys were still in the dining room finishing up their plates. My husband and I were in the kitchen, cleaning up. We were talking, so my husband was in front of me, and all of a sudden I heard the voice of a woman, but I ignored it because I hear things all the time. So I try to play it off because I know for sure it was only my three boys, my husband, and I. I try to play it off, I continue to do whatever I was doing.

Then I notice my husband acknowledge that sound too, because I saw his face startle; then he checked inside the dining room, and I was like, “Did you hear it too?” He just said, “Yeah,” and I said, “What did you hear?” Then he said, “A woman’s voice.” I said, “That is exactly what I heard.” I don’t know what it said. I do not remember.

JIM HAROLD: That’s one of those things, the disembodied voices – that’s kind of frightening, just talking to you. We had somebody a week or two ago that had somebody going, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” To have somebody doing that and there’s nobody there, that’s an odd feeling. Well, Ysenia, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing these stories, and I thank you so much for being a loyal listener and being a part of Campfire.

YSENIA: Thank you so much, Jim. Have a good one.

JIM HAROLD: Well, thank you for joining us for another Campfire. Of course, thank you to our callers. Without our callers, we would not have a show, so first and foremost, let’s thank them for being brave and coming on the show. We have a lot of repeats, so it must not be that bad. So when we have those submissions open in January over at jimharold.com/campfire, I hope you’ll consider sharing your story.

And speaking of sharing, we need to share a spooky shoutout. Demi emailed me and said, “Hi, Jim. My mom, Jenny, from Birmingham, England, is a huge fan of your Campfire podcast. She has asked for your books for Christmas, and your podcast is always playing when I visit her house.” Demi said that a shoutout would make her year, so Jenny, thank you so much for being a fan of our shows and stay spooky. And Demi said that her mom got her going on the shows and she’s enjoying them as well – so much so, she is going to join our Plus Club. So thank you very much, Jenny, for spreading the word, and thank you, Demi.

Also, I mentioned the Plus Club – I’ve got to say, jimharoldplus.com. Jimharoldplus.com. Go over there, click on the banner, and you’ll find out all about our Plus Club and how you can access thousands of episodes of our different shows going back to 2009. I would appreciate it. This holiday season, give yourself the gift of the Plus Club.

Also, a shoutout to our sponsors. Thank you very much. We appreciate them, and they, along with the Plus Club members, make the shows possible. So please support their products and services, and thank you for listening today. We appreciate it. I hope you’re having a great holiday season. Stay safe and stay spooky. We’ll talk to you next time. Bye-bye, everybody.

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

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