A strange visit at night, a story of missing time, a Ouija board story and much more on this new Campfire!

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TRANSCRIPT

A chilling childhood memory and much more strangeness 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 once again. If you are new here, here is what we do. We simply share true stories from real people who have experienced very strange things. Could be ghosts, could be creepy cryptid creatures, or could be UFOs, or my favorite, headscratchers. But whatever the stories are, they are real, they are true, and they are amazing. Welcome to our show, whether this is your first time tuning in or you’ve been a long-time loyal listener. Thank you so much for being a part of the Campfire.

We always like to give back here, so if you would like an opportunity to be entered in our giveaway to get a free book – we’re doing that this spring, our big Book Giveaway for Spring of 2022 – go to jimharold.com/giveaway. Every week we draw two lucky winners, and you can’t win if you aren’t entered. That’s jimharold.com/giveaway. Some restrictions apply. You have to be 18 years old or older, and you have to be in the U.S. just because of the realities of shipping. So check it out at jimharold.com/giveaway.

But the giveaway I think you’re most interested in is that of the giving and the sharing of some great Campfire stories. So let’s get right to it, and here’s the first one.

Allison is on the line from Wisconsin. You know I love to hear these stories going back to someone’s childhood or teen years, and that’s exactly where Allison is going to take us and explain some strange things that went on. Allison, welcome to the show, and please tell us your story.

ALLISON: Thank you for having me. This happened I would say probably when I was about 15-16 years old, so it would’ve been in the late ’70s, very early ’80s. I can’t be 100% sure. My parents were divorced, so we stayed at my dad’s house on weekends. This happened there.

I’m going to guess it was probably three, maybe four o’clock in the morning. It wasn’t long before sunrise, and I can get to that when I get to it. I woke up and I saw probably four to five hooded monk-like figures entering into my room. They were really tall. Very, very tall. My memory says there was a green outline, but I’m thinking back and wondering more if it was a dull green, maybe an aura. But green always seems to come to mind with them. But they were dark. The inside of them was dark.

They start walking towards my bed, and I’m terrified, and I do what we all do: I hid under my comforter. I could still see their shadows through the comforter, reaching for me. I obviously was terrified. I peeked over to my right to where my sister was sleeping, and I saw one of those figures sit down next to hear. It was kind of waving its hands over her, like it was doing to me when I was under the covers and seeing shadows, only this time she started clicking her teeth together, like that, and you could hear it, and blowing these spit bubbles.

It was just terrifying to see. Then I looked across from me, and we had our dresser, which was across from our twin beds. My stepmother was Catholic, and she had this Catholic figurine. I saw what looked like a young girl, and in this case it was more of a white-blue outline. She had long hair, kind of like Alice in Wonderland long, pulled back like that, and I could hear it moving back and forth on the dresser.

I am now 100% freaked out and I scream for help. My dad comes in, and of course my sister wakes up, and my dad pretty much chalked it up, after calming me down, that it was a nightmare. He left the room and my sister crawled into bed with me because I was terrified. I’m totally shook.

This is when things start moving around. The figures are gone, but I’m looking – and this is how I know it’s close to sunrise, because we had the curtains that had the shade that pulled down and then the curtains were tied up on either side. It looked like something was frilling them up and down, just frilling them up and down. I don’t know how else to explain it, but they were moving like somebody caressing, for lack of a better word, these curtains. I’m asking my sister, “Do you see this? Do you see this?” She’s seeing the same thing. I didn’t realize till later she wasn’t looking where I was looking.

Then I look on the bed, and you know when somebody crawls out of bed, the comforter would bunch up? It was bunched up, but it was bouncing back and forth. My sister tore her eyes away from what she was looking at and then saw that as well. So we’re both watching it bounce back and forth, sort of like – I don’t know, a better description would be like those big balloons that you could punch, back in the day when we were young, like the clowns you could punch in the face.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah.

ALLISON: Yeah, sort of like that. It was bouncing back and forth. So our eyes are completely on that. It turned out that my sister was looking at – next to my bed was a chair, and in the chair were dolls that she had, and she was looking over at these dolls, and apparently they were moving. I just talked to her; she said it wasn’t crazy like they were totally animated, but she said it was like the arm was moving very slowly, or she could see the hair moving. I now wish I had asked maybe if it was the same thing, like something caressing it.

The next morning we wake up – or did we ever fall asleep? I don’t remember. But where Julia was looking – and I think I forgot to mention, when those monk things were in our room, it was hovering over these dolls – but there was this black, thick, cobwebby stuff. Again, not crazy all over it, but it was definitely, if you were looking, you could see it. It was thick and black and over their eyes. We saw it in some other little places too.

I can’t explain any of this. I’ve never had an experience like it. I’ve shut that door for fear of it happening again. But yeah, that’s my story.

JIM HAROLD: You mentioned in your email it happened a week before a specific event. Do you want to talk about that?

ALLISON: Yeah, it happened a week before I was headed to a Christian retreat. I am Episcopalian, and it’s a thing called The Happening. It’s for kids that are in my age group, for teenagers.

I’ve been told that there are some relations to that. I was within that same year baptized in the Holy Spirit, and that’s where – if you’ve seen where people put their hands on somebody’s forehead and they drop back – that happened to me. I had no idea what I was going to experience at all except for what my feelings were, it felt like something very powerful entered me. And it did. It threw me back. I was euphoric. It was like I was floating. That is the experience I would love to have again. But that fear of those monk things – if I open that door, what else am I going to bring in? I can’t control it.

JIM HAROLD: Very, very interesting story, Allison. And the fact that your sister can corroborate your story and experienced this – that brings a lot to it. I know some people out there – we always get this from the skeptics out there, “Oh, they’re just dreaming.” You don’t believe this was a dream, right?

ALLISON: No, absolutely not. I wish it were because it was that terrifying. But like you said, too, my sister validated everything. Like I said, I just talked to her a week or so ago about this, telling her I was coming on the show, and she verified – she never saw the monk things. That happened before she woke, so she didn’t know that this thing was maybe using her as a puppet, so to speak. She didn’t know about any of that. She just remembers the things moving around in our room afterwards.

JIM HAROLD: Well, it’s an amazing story. Allison, thank you so much for sharing it tonight on the Campfire.

ALLISON: Thank you so much for having me, and stay spooky. 

JIM HAROLD: Stay spooky.

Mima is going to tell us a story tonight. She has been listening for over a decade, and she’s calling from New Jersey. She’s originally from Puerto Rico, and she’s going to tell us a story that happened to her down there. Mima, thank you so much, and thanks for listening all these years. Please tell us your story.

MIMA: Hola, Jim. Thank you so much for inviting me over to your show. It’s really an honor. I want to start by saying that that event happened in 2016, but even retelling the story today makes me feel a certain way. [laughs] So if you hear that my voice is a little shaky or something, it’s the impact of the story. But let me just start with what happened.

Back in 2016, I was doing my master’s degree at a college that is located in San Juan, Puerto Rico. That’s in the capital. That’s like an hour and 30 minutes away from where I used to live, which is a town called Arecibo. I used to have a friend that would go to not exactly the same college, but she would go to a college nearby, and she used to live in Arecibo as well, so she would normally carpool. Let’s call her Laura.

So we would go there three times a week, and one day, a very normal day, we decided that we wanted to meet up with her back-then boyfriend just to get something to eat and drink and whatever after class. That was going to be when we came back from San Juan in Arecibo. We decided that we were going to meet up at 7:30.

We started our trip back home, and there is a town called Manati. Manati is located not halfway there, because it’s closer to Arecibo than it is to San Juan, but there is a service area. We decided, “Hey, let’s stop by, freshen our makeup, change our clothes” and whatever. When we left the service area, we looked at the time because we wanted to make sure that we were going to be there by the time we said we would be there. And it was perfect. We took our time; as I said before, we changed clothes, whatever. It was 7:05.

We started the rest of the trip. We were like, “Awesome, we’re going to be there just in time,” because as I said, from Manati to Arecibo, it’s like a half an hour drive. Could be a little more, could be a little less. We had been driving just for a little bit, and out of the blue, out of nowhere, we see the sign that welcomed us to Arecibo.

You would think, okay, what’s special about that? The fact that in order for you to go from Manati to Arecibo, first off, you have to go through another city or town called Barceloneta. Barceloneta has a very distinctive bridge and some outlets, and we don’t have any recollection of going through that. Neither do we have any recollection of going through the toll that we were supposed to go through before going through the sign that would greet us and welcome us to Arecibo.

The interesting part is that, as I said, the trip would take you like 30 minutes from Point A to Point B, and when we looked at the time, it was actually 7:10.

JIM HAROLD: So it should’ve taken you a half hour and it took you five minutes.

MIMA: Exactly.

JIM HAROLD: Wow.

MIMA: I felt so – because the funny thing is, the way this happened, we see the sign, me and my friend, at the same time. We were like, “Arecibo? Wait a minute, we just made it here? We were there like five minutes ago. What happened?” We don’t have any recollection of what happened. We don’t know what this is. It has not happened anymore. This is just a once-in-a-lifetime event. But extremely – I don’t know, how can I describe it? It was I guess unique.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, that was unique to be able to make a 30-minute trip in five minutes. And you didn’t remember passing all of the different places you would’ve had to go through to get there, right?

MIMA: That’s exactly the – I don’t know what is weirder, the fact that we had to go through all these checkpoints where you should know – 

JIM HAROLD: Right, certain landmarks.

MIMA: Correct. We would be like, “Okay, we’re getting close, we’re seeing this, we’re seeing that.” No. And I remember that before the sign, all we saw was road, road, road. Nothing that would identify where we were until we saw that enormous, gigantic billboard or sign that greets you to the town of Arecibo. I remember I was so nervous when it happened because the reaction of my friend and my reaction was exactly the same, like, “Arecibo?” And then I started literally freaking out. I was like, oh my God, did this happen?

Funny enough, she was like, “Sometimes it’s better not to think about these things,” and I was like, “Oh my God, oh my God, I’m freaking out.” Then I’m calming a little bit, like, “Well, maybe we got distracted talking” and whatever, but then when I saw the time difference, I was like, no, no, no, no, no, we actually had this unexplainable thing that happened. I was like, “Did you see that we left at 7:05, right? And look at the time it is right now.” She’s like, “Well, actually, that’s the first thing I noticed but I didn’t want to freak you out even more than you are.” [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: Do you have any theories?

MIMA: Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t know what it could have been. I don’t know if this is a time slip. I don’t know if it is an alien abduction. I don’t know if we swapped our dimension. Honestly, I cannot explain it.

JIM HAROLD: Were there any other weird incidents in your life after this, or anything? Or life was normal except you were kind of freaked out about what in the world happened?

MIMA: Correct. When it comes to events like that one, that’s the only one. I would have never expected for me to experience this where everything looked normal except we got from Point A to Point B in five minutes when it should take you 30 minutes and you don’t have any recollection of how you got there.

JIM HAROLD: Very strange indeed. I would love, if other people have had similar experiences, if they’d sign up and share those stories, because I think it’s important when you have a story like this that you hear from other people who’ve experienced similar things. I know other people have. Some have been on the show. I’ve heard other cases, and I know that it’s a thing. But it’s got to be a little mind-bending and quite disconcerting, so I understand.

MIMA: There’s no words. I’m telling you, just by retelling this story, I’m going through the same emotions again. It’s like this huge question. “What just happened?” And there’s no answer. Or not at least that I know. [laughs] 

JIM HAROLD: Well, I wish we had an answer for you. We don’t, but I thank you so much for sharing this incredible story tonight on the Campfire.

MIMA: Thank you.

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You’re listening to Jim Harold’s Campfire.

JIM HAROLD: Tara is on the line from North Alabama. She’s been listening since 2016, so we appreciate her long-time loyal listenership. She’s going to go back to her high school years and tell us about a haunting. Tara, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us.

TARA: Thank you, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: Tell us what happened.

TARA: This was around my sophomore year of high school. I had become friends with a girl whose house was known to be very haunted. I’ve been told by mutual friends of ours about some small things, like hearing their name being called while using the bathroom, and when they would open the door, no one would be there and those who were in the home would deny doing so.

My first visit to her house was for her birthday party. Everything was fun up until I needed to use the bathroom, and as I was sitting down, I heard a very faint, “Tara.” I responded with, “Yeah?” Of course, no one was there.

JIM HAROLD: Yikes.

TARA: Yeah. I didn’t tell the other girls because I thought they were just messing around with me. Then as it came closer to bedtime, we started getting the futon in the living room together. We were getting dressed and hanging out when out of nowhere, this futon mattress – not the entire couch frame, but the mattress and bottom frame – started jumping up and down rather violently.

JIM HAROLD: Yikes! [laughs] When the bed starts jumping up and down by itself, that’s when I say, “It’s been a nice visit. I’ll see you later.”

TARA: Right. I should’ve known better. We all noticed it and were screaming, of course. It was a small single-wide trailer, and sometimes running the laundry and whatnot will cause a shake or a vibration or whatever, but nobody was doing laundry.

Thankfully, it didn’t last long. We somehow collected ourselves enough to go to sleep on this dang futon, except for me. I lay there trying to turn my mind off while the others were snoring. I heard the very distinct sound of the computer chair in the corner of the room spinning around as fast as it possibly could.

JIM HAROLD: Oh my lord.

TARA: Yeah, I shut my eyes as tight as I could and forced myself to sleep and was hoping it was just my imagination. But over my time spent at her house, it wasn’t just me. There was another situation where I had stayed over and my friend told me something that had happened to her as a young girl.

She told me about this one situation where her father ended up spanking her and grounding her when she was a child because he saw her playing in her room with a little boy. He got really mad thinking that she’d allowed some stranger into their house, but when he went into her room to confront her about it, the boy wasn’t there, and I guess he assumed he ran out through her bedroom window or something. Of course, my friend denied ever having anybody in there. She had never seen a boy. So I don’t know how that came about, but I was glad to know that I wasn’t the only one to see things or hear things.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, I’ve got to say, those youthful experiences, things that happen when you’re a kid, you really remember. But to me, a bedframe moving up and down, that’s a poltergeist. When they start moving things physically, that’s a poltergeist. And it kind of makes sense because it sounds like a bunch of young teenage girls, and they do say that poltergeists play off the energy of teenagers, boys and girls.

TARA: Right.

JIM HAROLD: It kind of makes sense that maybe something happened. I don’t know what the mechanism is that happens, but they say – people that write about it and research it and so forth say that poltergeists happen a lot of times with adolescent kids and teenagers. It’s just something that feeds off their energy.

TARA: Yeah, for sure. There were two more things that I wanted to mention.

JIM HAROLD: Sure.

TARA: On another night, a friend of ours was staying over, and she and I slept in this bedroom of my friend. My friend had gone and stayed in a different room. Around three o’clock in the morning, I could hear my phone beeping really loudly, signaling that my battery was dying. You know the really old Nokia cellphones? They would beep so loud. And I couldn’t get up. I was still asleep, but I could hear the sound, and it was really irritating. I couldn’t wake up to turn it off.

Finally, I’m looking around the room – my ears are awake and now my eyes are awake – and I see a group of – I guess you would call them shadow people. All along the side of the bed. There were three or four in the front and then maybe five behind those. The ones that were in the front were shorter than the ones in the back, and they just stood there, staring, motionless, no noise, no nothing.

When I finally did sit up, I rolled over to my friend and grabbed my phone and turned it off and threw it across the room. I said something along the lines of, “This needs to stop.” Once I got back into bed and I lay down, I heard a whispered female voice coming from the door of the bedroom, calling out for my friend. Instead of being as scared as I was, I was a little bit relieved knowing that they were trying to get somebody else’s attention instead of mine. [laughs] But very, very creepy.

JIM HAROLD: Indeed, indeed. Great stories. The thing is, waking up to see a group of shadow people – one is bad enough, but a whole group! Do you have any theories as to what they were?

TARA: I do, which leads into one more short story, but even that doesn’t really give me all the answers I want. There was another night where I was asleep in the guest room by myself, and this room didn’t have a door. I was getting into bed and I heard my name whispered from the doorway. I didn’t respond, thinking it was my friend. It wasn’t, because she repeated my name again and I realized that it was a familiar voice and one that scared me.

She said, “Tara, come here.” I lay there silent and still and was waiting for her to leave, but instead of leaving, she came into the room, walked around the foot of my bed, went to the head of my bed, around the coffee table, and back to the door. She was speaking to someone that was with her as if telling them that I wasn’t listening. The other voice in response was low and grumbly and insistent for her to continue. So she walked back into my room, walked around the bed and the table again.

And then on the second round, she sat down in bed with me. It caused the bed to bounce. My body bounced with it. I rolled as close to the wall as I could and just lay frozen in fear. But as I was praying silently in my head, it was interrupted by this fast-moving, sepia-toned picture reel of this young blonde-haired girl in an old-fashioned white dress. She’s climbing up this ladder – you know like where a hayloft is in a barn? And before she gets to the very top, she falls backwards to the ground.

As soon as she fell to the ground, that was it. I somehow went back to sleep. But knowing that this is a familiar voice that I’d heard calling my name and calling my friend’s name, and the fact that she’s speaking to someone else, which was definitely a lower vibration type entity, I don’t think that the young girl that’s involved in all of this was anything bad or evil. Maybe just somebody that had been trapped there for some reason, and then these other things were somehow working in tandem with her.

That’s about as much as I have as far as who and why.

JIM HAROLD: Well, again, these mysteries are amazing to contemplate. Thank you for sharing your story so we can contemplate it ourselves. Thank you so much, Tara.

TARA: No problem. Thank you so much.

JIM HAROLD: Tracie is listening to us and calling in today from New Mexico. She found out about us from Astonishing Legends. Just recently did an episode with them, so kind of serendipitous. Certainly check them out if you haven’t had the opportunity. Tracie is going to tell us about a hotel she visited in Las Vegas, New Mexico, actually, not Nevada. So glad to have Tracie with us today. Tracie, welcome to the show and tell us what happened.

TRACIE: Thank you so much, Jim. The story that I’m going to tell took place in the fall of 2019. It was my first year of teaching. Things get pretty stressful when you’re in the classroom, so I decided to go on a pretty short road trip with a couple of other teachers that I got close with. We were all in our first year, very stressed, wanted some relief. So we decided to go to some hot springs in New Mexico, which is where we were.

There happened to be this hotel that just got renovated that was, back in the early 1900s, a part of this chain of hotels by Fred Harvey. I was really interested in it. I’m not going to say the name; you can look it up if you’re interested. But after the hot springs, we went to the hotel and we had lunch. I spoke to some people who were working at the hotel and asked if we could look around. Fortunately, they gave us permission and said we could go to the second floor, poke around a little bit, but to keep in mind that the other half of the hotel was off limits because it was still being renovated. Totally fine, respected it.

So we went up to the second floor, and I want you to picture a ‘T’ in your mind, where the top of the ‘T’ is the hallway and the bottom of the ‘T’ is this little nook. So me and my friends are looking around; we go into this little nook, and they’re looking at maybe a writing desk and I’m looking at a hutch. This hutch happens to be next to a stairwell that goes God knows where. I have no idea, but it was dark and creepy and I obviously got pretty bad vibes from it.

But didn’t care too much – that is, until I started to feel odd. I started to feel so gloomy, so depressed. And keep in mind, seconds before this I was fine. I was having the time of my life. I was overcome with so much sadness. I felt the worst that I ever had in my life. Then I started to feel tightening around my neck, like somebody was choking me.

I don’t know what came over me, but I felt like I was feeling somebody’s death. Which I know is pretty dark, so I took it very seriously. I started to gasp for breath because I couldn’t breathe anymore. I struggled to tell my friends, who were behind me, that I needed to leave. I started gripping the sides of the walls because I couldn’t stand up by this point. My friends told me that my face was red. I did not look well.

I got to the longer hallway that leads out to the first floor and I looked up, and just as I looked towards the exit, I saw someone walk across that looked like they were wearing period bellboy clothing. That frightened me to no end. As you can imagine, I tore out of there as fast as I could, got into my car. I was heaving and I was crying. I’d never experienced anything like that in my life before.

JIM HAROLD: Oh my.

TRACIE: I’ve never been back to that side of the hotel. I do go to the restaurant from time to time, but that hotel definitely changed me.

JIM HAROLD: Did you know or did you research or find out any historical information? I expect it would be hard to find anything like that.

TRACIE: No, I just know that the hotel is being renovated. It’s this whole chain of hotels in the Southwest that are being renovated to bring back the glory of its past days.

JIM HAROLD: Interesting. Yeah, I would think hotels would be very ripe for paranormal activity because there’s a lot of emotion and those kinds of things, especially if someone was dying and had some kind of choking situation or something. My goodness. What a story. And you’re sworn off, you’re not going to go into that area, obviously, that that happened? And by the way, I wouldn’t blame you if you don’t.

TRACIE: Yes. And like I mentioned, I do go to the restaurant from time to time. I’ve made friends with the waitstaff. They have expressed that it is extremely haunted. I think it was featured on an episode of some type of paranormal show as well.

JIM HAROLD: Very interesting indeed. Tracie, thank you so much for listening and for sharing your story today on the Campfire.

TRACIE: Absolutely. Thank you, Jim. Goodbye.

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Recently I had Framebridge do a jersey for me, a pro football jersey, and I just thought they did such a tremendous job. It was just fantastic. We’re also going to be doing some more family photos as well, so I’m really excited to see what Framebridge can do with those. And I love that idea of creating permanence, taking your digital photos and making them more permanent by creating a physical heirloom, as it were. I think that’s really great.

Father’s Day is coming up, so you could go the route that I did – kind of Father’s Day for myself – I got that pro football jersey framed. You could get some kind of sports memorabilia or something like that framed. Or you could go the other route and go for the family thing, because you know Dad has a soft spot in his heart for the family. So you could go that route, too. It is a great Father’s Day gift solution. It’s really great every day of the year.

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Follow Jim on Twitter and Instagram @thejimharold and join our Virtual Campfire Facebook group at virtualcampfiregroup.com. Now, back to the Campfire.

JIM HAROLD: Next up on the Campfire is a return caller. Jamie is dialing in from southern Indiana – the Louisville, Kentucky area – and he’s going to tell us about a job he worked in downtown Louisville. I guess it should be “Lou-a-ville” – well, anyway, you get the idea. Jamie’s here to tell us about his workplace experience. Jamie, thank you for joining us on the Campfire. Tell us what happened.

JAMIE: Thanks for having me back, Jim. I was a supervisor for a security company that was primarily based in a Louisville area. One of my responsibilities was, if an officer didn’t show up for their post, then the building manager or the client would contact me; I would either get a fill-in or I would come fill in myself. A lot of our clients were those old downtown Louisville buildings.

One particular night, I got a call from one of them. Call came in probably about 9:30, 10:00. Their officer hadn’t shown up. So I reported to the building. Got there, introduced myself to the building manager. He explained to me that the cleaning crew that was there working had just left. He had just walked them out and locked the door behind them. The two of us were the only two left in the building. He said, “Just stick around till 11:30. The security desk is right there. Shouldn’t have any issues.” Perfect.

He leaves, I lock the door behind him. Now I’m the only person left in the building. I found my post orders to make sure there weren’t any special details I had to take care of while I was there. The only thing that I needed to do was to ensure that an attorney’s office that was located in the building set their alarm for their specific office, and that was it.

Just to paint a picture of the lobby area of this building, it was about a two-story lobby. You walk in the front door, elevators were on the left and the emergency stairs were just to the left of those. Just past the elevators was a commissary area, so snacks and whatnot, and the restrooms were there. A set of double doors that went out the back of the building was just around the corner from the commissary. The security desk, and then there was a bank in the right-hand corner of the building, and then there was an open air stairwell that went up to that attorney’s office. For a building in downtown Louisville, it was a fairly small lobby.

I thought, “Okay, I’ll go up and make sure the alarm’s set at the attorney’s office. That way I’ve got that out of the way and then it’s just a waiting game.” So I go bee-bopping up that open air stairwell and I get about halfway up the stairs and I hear someone say, “Hello.”

JIM HAROLD: Oh boy. [laughs]

JAMIE: Yes. And the acoustic echo that you would expect to be in the lobby. I immediately go into security mode. No one’s supposed to be in here. So I rush down the stairs, check everywhere. No one to be seen. I go through and start checking doors, making sure maybe someone wasn’t hiding in a bathroom or something. All these doors were already locked. The commissary door was locked. The restroom doors were even locked. I unlocked them, went in to check and make sure there was no one hiding in there. There was no one. Of course, the bank door was locked. All the doors that had access to this lobby were locked. Even the double doors that went out to the back – they were actually chained locked. And from the stairwell, you could actually see the entire lobby.

Obviously, I’m a bit on edge now. I heard this voice very clear, said “Hello,” had that echo. I start pacing around. I don’t really know what to do with myself at that point. And then it occurred to me: I never did make it up there to check that alarm. So I start up the stairwell again. Again, about halfway up, I hear the distinct sound of a door closing. I rush back downstairs, again check all the doors. Everything is locked. No explanation on what that sound could’ve been. There was no door that could’ve closed. They were all locked.

That was the night I learned something about myself: the idea of paranormal things doesn’t bother me unless I’m by myself. I spent about the last 45 minutes standing at the door that I was going to exit out of, watching my clock, because I wasn’t going to go anywhere else in that building. Never did check to see if the attorney’s office alarm was set or anything. I just waited until 11:30 when I could leave and I hightailed it out of there.

So that’s the gist of the story. I actually went back a week or so later to talk to the officer that typically worked that post, and when I walked in, she sees me and she thinks she’s automatically in trouble because “the supervisor’s here, I didn’t show up to work that day.” I quickly dismissed her worry. “That’s not why I’m here. Just out of curiosity, have you ever experienced anything in this building once everyone leaves at night?”

She said, “Oh yeah, I’ll hear voices, I’ll hear someone say hello to me all the time, I’ll hear doors closing, that sort of thing. Happens all the time.” She acted like it didn’t bother her at all. It freaked me out. I said, “Okay, thanks.” Never told her why I was asking and got out of there. [laughs] Never been back to that building since.

JIM HAROLD: We know from doing these many shows over the years, these things exist. I think to me, being in security is very brave because you never know what you’re going to run into.

JAMIE: You’re exactly right.

JIM HAROLD: But I believe that probably that’s one of the more memorable things you’ve ever run into, and it’s not even really a person. It’s a ghost.

JAMIE: Absolutely, yes. Like I said, we had several of those buildings in downtown Louisville, so I made it my knight’s mission to go into some of the other ones that I knew there was an officer stationed there overnight to ask them if they had ever experienced anything. Nearly 100% of them, “Oh, absolutely.” They had their different stories. There’s always been a lot of talk about those buildings being haunted anyway, but yeah, a lot of those security officers assigned to those buildings confirmed that they had seen things, whether it be shadow people or hearing voices.

One particular officer told me that the cleaning crew wouldn’t go on a certain floor after a certain hour because they felt an entity chase them down the hallway. So they refused to go on that floor after a certain hour. A lot of little stories like that surrounding the downtown Louisville area.

JIM HAROLD: Jamie, thanks so much for sharing your story with us tonight on the Campfire.

JAMIE: Thanks for having me back, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: Doug is on the line from Rhode Island. He’s a big supporter of the show. He’s also a Plus member. We appreciate that. He’s calling with a story about something many people face and a very personal story, and we appreciate him sharing it here on the program. Doug, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us, thank you for your support, and tell us your story.

DOUG: Thank you. It’s a pleasure. In 2008 I was diagnosed with melanoma. We had just got a new apartment. We just had our son seven months before that. So it was a surprise, nonetheless. This story, I think it was in late 2019. It was just one of those nights, a tougher night, and I couldn’t sleep. I was uncomfortable. I was being hard on myself. So I ended up going outside to change the scenery to snap myself out of it. It was one of those things where you’re like – I’m not religious; I wasn’t born in a crazy religious family. I wasn’t baptized or anything. But you always have that thought of something being out there that’s bigger.

JIM HAROLD: Sure.

DOUG: So I was outside, and I said the whole thing I’m sure plenty of people have said, like “If someone’s out there, if someone’s listening to me, maybe cut me some slack tonight just so I can relax, maybe sleep, not be in pain.”

The way I see it now, I’m looking back on it, instead of it being current. I’m standing in front of my house, and it’s in the city. I’m looking across the street and I see a shooting star, but it was big. Like a normal shooting star, but three or four times the size of a normal one. It was going from the top left of my view down to the bottom right. A shooting star is fast, but it was still something that caught my eye, like, “Oh, that’s weird.”

Then I got this almost slow motion feeling. I started feeling this warm, euphoric feeling. It started at my feet and it slowly went through my body. Through my feet, up my legs, into my waist, through my torso, down my arms, into my fingertips, and it almost felt like it went right out my head. I was left standing there, just in shock. Still with tears coming down my cheeks from being upset, but just nothing. When I say nothing, I mean I was just happy, but almost in absolute shock. Because I worked in healthcare for 12 years, and I know that that just doesn’t happen.

I’ve had other paranormal experiences growing up, and I’m still a very skeptical person, but this is one of those – this is really the first thing that I could not explain away. It’s impossible.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah. It’s one thing to be skeptical, but then when something happens to them, they’re like, “I know what I saw. I know what I experienced.” It really makes a difference when you personally experience something.

DOUG: Yeah, this is one of those things where I can’t explain it away. I almost feel like it happened the way it did almost to be like, “Hey, try to explain this one away.” [laughs] I don’t know what it was or who it was, but I think in the series – that shooting star that caught my eye like, “What? That’s big, and it’s moving slower for a shooting star,” and then that feeling – it’s just so weird. We all need to have reason or logic behind things, and this one just doesn’t have it. You can’t explain it away.

JIM HAROLD: The way you explained it in the note to me is you had this warm euphoric feeling that entered your feet, went up to your legs, into your waist and through your torso.

DOUG: Yeah. It almost felt like it went out the top of my head. This was at a time when the treatments I was on, I had almost no thought processing, like memory or anything. So when I think back on it, it’s not like me thinking from inside my body looking out my eyes. It’s like I’m looking at it from out of my body, if that makes sense. For some reason, it keeps popping into my head like a light, like a warm, glowing light. It’s weird.

JIM HAROLD: You mentioned to me offline – I hope it’s okay if I mention this – you’re in full remission. Do you think in some ways you were cured that evening, or the beginning of a cure, or like a miracle?

DOUG: No, I don’t think so. I think it was just at that time, I wasn’t in control of my emotions. It was almost like “Cut me some slack” – not expecting anything. It was just one of those things that I guess a lot of people do. You’re not expecting anything out of it. But that night, that changed me. Since that happened, it’s almost like I’m open to this whole different energy. I’m still trying to figure it out, but a lot more things happened since then that, again, I can’t explain away. It’s almost like you’re in tune to something else now.

I heard one of your other callers say something about – I think it was a woman. She said she just had this feeling of knowing. And that’s crazy now. Go ahead.

JIM HAROLD: You were saying that you’re trying to figure it out. I have news for you: most of the people listening are trying to figure it out. [laughs] It’s not just you. I don’t think we’ll ever get it figured out, but we’re all trying to figure it out.

DOUG: Yeah. From hearing some of the stories on your show, it’s absolutely 100% opened my eyes to a whole different area of the paranormal. All these people can’t – it’s huge. It’s hard to explain. Especially that night. It was very odd. You’re anxious and not feeling well and all this stuff and you’re like “ugh,” just down on yourself, feeling horrible. And then within the snap of a finger, nothing. You’re happy.

JIM HAROLD: Everybody, when they think paranormal, they think it’s all the scary and the spooky stuff and it’s the demons and this and that. And yeah, I believe there’s a darker side to it, a more sinister side, but I also believe there’s a side you’re talking about, too. The reassuring side, the comforting side, the poignant side, and the side that shows you there’s a continuum. This sounds like this was the positive side, for sure.

Doug, I’m so glad that you had that when you needed it. I’m glad that you found the shows to be useful. I thank you so much for sharing this very personal story on the Campfire tonight.

DOUG: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll call in soon again, because I have more stories. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: Excellent. Thanks so much, Doug.

DOUG: Yeah, no problem. Thank you.

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You’re listening to Jim Harold’s Campfire.

JIM HAROLD: Jordan’s on the line from Indiana. She typed “paranormal podcast” up into Google, and the Paranormal Podcast, my other show (please check it out, it’s free) came up. She found that, then she found the Campfire, and here she is telling a Ouija board story. Jordan, welcome to the show from Indiana. We thank you for joining us. Tell us what happened.

JORDAN: Thank you so much. As a teenager, I had a bunch of hooligan friends, all girls. We loved wreaking havoc, pretty much. We got a Ouija board and decided one night while the parents were out, we were going to play with it in the living room.

So we turned out all the lights, got candles. There were five or six of us. We were calling to the spirit of a boy specifically. We didn’t know what we were getting into, but we were trying to call to a boy who had passed away. He had gone to our high school, and he tragically passed from a car accident. I had never met this boy, but everybody knew about him. It’s a small town. We knew everybody else.

So we called to him. Nothing was really happening. The planchette did start moving, but I knew that the girls were probably playing a trick on me. But after a couple times of the planchette moving, we heard what we thought was a whistle. It didn’t come from our circle of friends. The whistle came from at least a few feet behind us. A couple of us girls look up from the board and we’re just looking at each other like, “Did you hear that? Did you hear something?” We look around to see where the sound came from, because it was just us in the house. We didn’t know where it could’ve come from.

It was a very open concept house. We look over into the next room, and there is I would say a tall teenage-boy-sized shadow by the front door. It’s just keeping its head around the wall that’s by the door. Even though this is basically what we were trying to do, we freaked out. I just knew that everybody was going to run, and I was not going to be the last one to leave the room. I was too scared for that. So I ran into the bedroom, which was connected to the living room that we were in. I jumped on the bed, and the bed was facing the door.

All the other girls had followed me and ran into the room. I watched each one run in there. I was kind of in shock. As the last girl runs into the room, the door was not touched, but it slams shut right behind her. We’re tiny little teenage girls; I highly doubt that a gust of wind from running would’ve been enough to slam the door. But the door definitely had some force behind it when it slammed.

We did not want to go back in the living room, but luckily, the girl’s bedroom that we ran into had a sliding patio door that was attached to a little deck out back. We all left out that back door and did not go back. That is that story. That’s always stuck with me. That’s one of my most profound experiences that I think I’ve had.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, that would do it, absolutely.

JORDAN: Definitely.

JIM HAROLD: The world is a lot stranger place than we think, Jordan. It certainly is.

JORDAN: Absolutely. I do have a smaller Ouija board thing that goes with that. It’s the same group of friends.

JIM HAROLD: Go ahead.

JORDAN: Our same group of friends went to my house this time – it was daylight. We weren’t expecting anything spooky to happen. We were talking. Of course, the planchette was moving, and I always expected them to be playing tricks on me. But they didn’t know that in the 1980s, before I was born, my uncle had passed away in a car accident. My mom was present. They were very close. They were the first two children born.

We were trying to contact anybody, but I was subconsciously trying to contact him. His name was Randy. Like I said, I’d never met him, but there was a large portrait of him in my mom’s closet, tucked away, covered with parchment paper, that was of significance to her. We were calling out to him. We were getting answers. But I said, “If you are the spirit of my uncle, there’s a portrait of you in my mom’s room.” At this point, I actually took my hands off the planchette because I really wanted to test and see if this was legit.

I said, “What is happening in the portrait of you?” And the letters spelled “S-K-I.” In that picture, he was waterskiing. That’s really it. I don’t remember what happened. I was so shocked. My mom was standing there; she actually started tearing up a little bit. And obviously, you don’t know what you’re contacting when you’re on a Ouija board. It could’ve been anything. But it was a very powerful moment, and it just shows that there is something to a Ouija board. Who knows what. But I have not messed with one since then. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: We’ve had multiple stories – we just recently had another story – I don’t want to reference it too much because it may be on this episode, it may be on another. Just today as we were recording, we had another very powerful Ouija board story. I definitely believe that somehow, when you use the Ouija board, sometimes you can tap into things. Now, whether the Ouija board is just the instrument for that and it’s actually tapping into the person or what that is, but I think it is a real thing. The question is, what are you tapping into? I don’t know if anybody has the answer to that. But very interesting.

JORDAN: Right. One of our mysteries.

JIM HAROLD: Indeed. Thank you for exploring the mysteries with us today, Jordan, and sharing your Campfire stories. We thank you for being a part of the program.

JORDAN: Thank you so much, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: Next up on the Campfire is Mark from Tennessee. He is in the healthcare field, and certainly we thank Mark and all people who are in healthcare. I mean, my goodness, what a difference they make in our lives, and certainly they’ve had a challenging couple of years, so God bless all our workers in healthcare for everything they do for us to keep us healthy and keep living productive lives.

Mark is here, and he’s going to tell us about a strange experience he had in the course of work. Mark, welcome to the program. Please tell us what happened.

MARK: Hey, thank you, Jim. I guess I’ll get started. I’m a registered nurse, and I’ve been a registered nurse since 2014. I worked in a cardiovascular intensive care unit for about six years, and now I’m a graduate student in a nursing anesthesia program in Tennessee. But during my time in the ICU, I had some sick patients. It was towards the beginning of my career in nursing when I had my experience here, in 2016. I think it was maybe in September.

Anyway, I had been working all week, about three days of 12-hour shifts in a row, and I was assigned to a very sick patient. The patient had multiple comorbidities. She was not doing so well, but we were still trying to make her better and get her through what she was going through. Eventually, things were going south very quickly throughout my shifts, and I advocated for her family to get in touch with palliative care, which is comfort care for the terminally ill, thinking about end-of-life goals and the quality of the rest of her life rather than the quantity. We discussed that with the surgical team and we got the family in touch with them, and they had a family meeting.

I had taken care of this patient Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and on Friday, my wife and I were going to Kentucky to a friend’s wedding. So we went there on Friday, leaving the patient on Thursday to deal with whatever was to come with her. I try to leave work at work and don’t take work home with me, especially work in the ICU. Anyway, left there for Kentucky and got to Kentucky on Friday evening. Had the rehearsal at the wedding, and everything was normal. It was kind of in the boonies, a little bit.

That night, we stayed in a cabin, which was on the venue but off situated in its own little area. My wife and I had the cabin to ourselves, and then the rest of the wedding party had their own little cabin. We slept in the upstairs, which was pretty creepy. It was kind of primitive, nothing really – well, I guess there was civilization, but it was a little primitive and out in the boonies and a very dark night.

Anyway, we fell asleep, and I had a dream that night, which was Friday night. The only dream I had that night. What I saw in the dream was a blank white space with the same patient that I’d been taking care of all week. She looked normal. She didn’t have any of the medical equipment that she had. No intratracheal tube, no IV punctures, just in a bed. A regular bed, not a hospital bed. She had developed a pressure sore on her lip where the intratracheal tube was, and you could see through it in real life. You could see her teeth from the outside, pretty much. But that wasn’t there. She looked like a normal person, but I had never seen her normal until my dream. I don’t know if my brain was just creating that or what. She was just lying in this bed, staring at me. It was weird.

Immediately in my dream, I was taken aback by this person who I thought in my subconscious to be dead, maybe, probably wasn’t going to make it, but she was staring at me sort of – I don’t know, listlessly I guess is the best way to describe it. No real emotion in her eyes. I looked at her back in my dream, and it seemed like it lasted maybe 10 seconds. And then she said, “I love you,” which was weird. [laughs] Then I said, “I love you too,” and then I woke up from the dream.

That was it about the dream. I thought it was weird. Woke up. Kind of scary. But time went on, and my friend had the wedding and everything was good. Then when I returned to work the next week, I checked with the nurse who I had handed off to prior to leaving on Thursday, and I asked “Whatever happened to that patient? How did she do?” Because I noticed when I walked into the unit, I didn’t see her in the same room, so I knew something happened.

She said, “Oh yeah, she passed away.” I said, “When did she pass away?” She said, “Friday night.” So that was the same night that I had the dream. I don’t know, that’s the story.

JIM HAROLD: In your email to me you mentioned that on my other show, the Paranormal Podcast, Episode 715, we talked about shared death experiences, where people have this experience – they could be in the room, they could be half a world away, where something happens to them at the same time somebody passes. I think it’s an interesting concept, and I’ve heard of it before.

In your email, you said, “I don’t know if this counts as one of those experiences,” but at least to me – and again, I’m no expert – but to me, it would qualify. It would be under that shared death experience. It was someone who, as much as a patient and a nurse can get close, you guys obviously had a relationship. And this seems like it happened right around the time of passing.

If people want to check that out, the guest was William J. Peters, it is Episode 715 of the Paranormal Podcast, and he has a book out called At Heaven’s Door. But to me – again, I didn’t write the book; I’m not an expert – but it would seem to fall maybe into that classification.

MARK: I agree with you. That’s actually what sparked my memory, listening to that podcast. I was racking my brain for any experiences I’ve had, and I was like, oh wow, I’ve actually maybe experienced that. I’m not quite sure if it was legit or if it was just my stressed brain manifesting a dream. But it seemed enough of a coincidence to mention.

JIM HAROLD: The one thing I would say is that if it was a communication from the other side, you ought to feel very proud that you meant that much to a patient that they would reach out in that way. So kudos to you. I know you’re continuing your work in the healthcare field, and we wish you all the best. Thank you for being a part of the Campfire tonight.

MARK: I appreciate you. Thank you, Jim.

JIM HAROLD: Dietrie is on the line from Vancouver, Canada. Love getting calls from our friends up north. Dietrie has a story for us that Dietrie feels relates to a story we had a few episodes ago with Rochelle and talks about things like sleep apnea and so forth. Dietrie, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us, and please tell us your experience.

DIETRIE: Thank you, Jim. I was diagnosed with sleep apnea, and I also have another sleep disorder called hypersomnia. I also have several mental illnesses, which are all regulated. I’ve had my brain scanned and I’m all under control. [laughs]

I’ve always been a science fiction fan, but I’ve never had dreams about aliens or anything even remotely space-related until I moved here to the Pacific Northwest about six years ago, and then everything changed. Rochelle mentioned that she had a series of dreams where there was time traveling involved and a lot of potentially alien stuff. The same thing started happening to me. I’ve had dreams where I’m in a caravan with a bunch of people from long, long ago and also far into the future, in places that I don’t think were Earth, with all kinds of really strange, hard-to-describe technology.

I have a few dreams outlined here that I can summarize. One of the first dreams that I had, I was in some kind of exchange program with other humanoids who lived on another planet somewhere. Apparently I was somebody’s homework assignment, and she was in charge of coding me. She was the person who coded me, and she looked just like me, but I knew that she wasn’t me. She was really upset with how things were set up, like whoever was setting up the rules for how things operate on Earth (in the dream, anyway).

She had me sit down next to her desk. She had a desk. And then she started – it looked like she had a touchscreen. She was reacting like she had a touchscreen, but it was just hovering in the air, and it was also invisible to me. During this time when she was doing all of the coding stuff, I knew she was reprogramming something, like fixing something in my programming. But I felt absolutely no desire to move or question anything. It was this impulse of “I need to be still because she needs me to be still,” and I was just okay with that, which ordinarily, that’s very strange and very uncharacteristic for me.

After she did the programming, she got in trouble for doing it, and then I was sent back. But on the ship back to Earth – again, in the dream – I started seeing all of these light symbols that were just behind reality. It’s like I could see just a little bit past the walls, and there were all of these light letters that kept moving and changing. I kept pointing them out to the other humans that were there with me, and nobody else could see them. And the more that I pointed them out and nobody else could see them, the fainter they got for me.

What’s really interesting is not long after that, I started training in reiki, and when I started training in reiki – I’m a reiki master level practitioner now – the dreams just went up through the roof. I have a few more dreams that I can share, if we still have time.

JIM HAROLD: Sure, go ahead.

DIETRIE: In one, I apparently was some kind of ambassador. In the context of the dream, it felt like I was what people here call a Starseed, for lack of a better term. They pulled me up into space, but I wasn’t in a physical body, and I was also very large. I was planet-sized. I couldn’t see myself, but my perception of things was like I could reach out and touch a planet and manipulate it if I needed to.

They showed me they have this protective ring of planets around Planet Earth, and it’s like a protection thing. They were asking my input on if it would be safe to let humanity know that they are here, this close, protecting everyone. From their perspective – I saw it the alien way, and it made complete sense. But then I changed to my human filter and a bunch of the planets were invisible in the human filter, and the rest of them looked like really cheap copies of Earth. They looked very suspicious. I told them, “No, you have to fix the human filter. This is going to freak people out. Don’t do that.” So that was another dream that I had.

A different dream – I was going about my dream life, and time stopped. Everyone around me froze in the dream, and some aliens came in and they’re like, “Hey, we’re here for your check-in on how your mission is going.” The context is apparently I was affiliated with them and I was acting as some kind of spy or something. Like I was doing an important mission, but if another type of alien found out about it, I would be in danger.

But in the dream, my human memory had not worn off yet. I hadn’t switched to the alien mode yet, so I had no idea what they were talking about. I had no idea who they were. So I was like “Uh, it’s going bad? Okay? I don’t know?” [laughs] And they were like, “Oh, we have to wait a minute.” And then it kicked in and I was like, “Oh!” and I told them everything. I can’t remember now what it was, but I told them how things were going.

I remember going out and I looked up and I could see all of this alien technology everywhere, flying overhead, plain as day. I was like, “Why can’t I keep this? I want to be able to see this as a human.” They said, “If we allowed you to see that much detail, then you – because we know you – would look up at it, because you get distracted by shiny things. You would look up at it, and then they would know that you were there and it wouldn’t be safe. That’s why we take that away from you, so you can’t see it in the waking world.”

JIM HAROLD: You had mentioned sleep apnea and so forth, some issues you had dealt with. You think this is aside from that, though; you think this is maybe giving you some glimpse into other realities, possibly?

DIETRIE: I think it’s absolutely a possibility. I recently had an astrology cosmic origin report that said that I am not from this universe. I’m still processing how I feel about that. But I think anything’s possible, for sure.

I’m also a shamanic practitioner, so I do a lot of work with traveling between realms. I also want to clarify, I do not drink alcohol, I do not use any substances, I do not smoke. No judgment on anyone who does; that’s just not how I operate. I just use traditional rattles. So I do go back and forth between realms that way and between the shamanic stuff, which also came after all of these dreams. It’s like I had the first dream, I was led to reiki; after reiki, I was led to shamanism, and then the dreams have kept going.

I think they’re connected – I have a really quick shamanic thing.

JIM HAROLD: Sure, go ahead.

DIETRIE: In the shamanic journey, you astral travel, basically, and you go somewhere and you get shown something. I myself am not good with mechanics or math or engineering or anything. That’s my husband. My husband is very good at all of that stuff. I can’t name anything.

So I found myself in this open plane; there was this faint rainbow and a building that looked like an air hanger. Then I looked up, and above me there was – the best I could describe is like a biplane, but it had propellors. I came out of the journey and I drew a picture of it as best as I could.

JIM HAROLD: Oh, okay. Folks, you can’t see it, but Dietrie is showing me a small illustration of this object.

DIETRIE: Yeah. It was completely silent, unlike anything I’d ever seen, and the date on this journey was the 26^th of January. That’s important. The next day, I showed the drawing to my husband because I’m like, “I need to know what this thing is.” He said, “That reminds me of an air yacht.” I was like, “What’s an air yacht? Is this a thing?” It turns out – and the first articles about this that I could find are from January 11^th, so it is before the journey – but there’s this company called Lazzarini that made an air yacht that looks exactly like this thing that I drew. Yeah, it’s possible that I maybe saw it in the background somewhere and my subconscious held onto it – 

JIM: What are they?

DIETRIE: The air yachts are giant – they’ve got two tubes and a connecting bridge. I think they’re trying to make them solar-powered, and they have propellers. It’s really interesting when I read into it. But this is not the kind of stuff that I come across. I would not get ads for this. And I had no idea what it was, and it was a thing that I was shown in this journey that I really don’t think I’d come across before. It is possible I have. I don’t think so. So it’s fascinating.

JIM: Very fascinating indeed. Sometimes I do believe we’re shown things in dreams. Sometimes the meaning is very apparent, and sometimes it is certainly more mysterious. Dietrie, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your stories on the Campfire.

DIETRIE: Thank you.

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