A woman who literally sees death coming for others, a haunted bakery, and oh so much more spookiness on this edition of the Campfire!
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JIM HAROLD: A woman who sees Death coming before a person dies. Spooky stuff on this edition of the Campfire.
Welcome to our gathering tonight. Here we share stories of ordinary people who have experienced extraordinary things. Sit back, relax, and warm yourself by Jim Harold’s Campfire.
JIM HAROLD: Welcome to the Campfire. I am Jim Harold and so glad to be with you once again. If you’re new around here, what we do is share the best in real stories and true stories of the strange, the supernatural, the paranormal. Could be ghosts, could be cryptid creatures, UFOs, or my favorite, headscratchers – but whatever they are, they are real and fascinating. Welcome to our Campfire.
And as a special gift to listeners new and listeners old, or longtime listeners I should say, is something free I would like to give to you. Many of you have taken advantage of it, and I hope that many more will. We created a little mini eBook of favorite Campfire stories compiled from our five Campfire books, and you can get it by going to jimharold.com and clicking on the orange button. That’s jimharold.com and clicking on the orange button at the top of the page that says “Click here to get your free Campfire eBook.” I hope that you will take advantage of getting that eBook of 10 favorite Campfire stories from our books.
Also, this St. Patrick’s Day, tomorrow, March 17th, at 8 p.m. Eastern, we’re going to do kind of a semi-impromptu livestream. That will be on my YouTube channel at youtube.com/jimharold. To be honest with you, it’s going to be very laidback. Some Q&A just to get your thoughts and so forth. Maybe to bring some people in on video. Just really looking forward to it, and hope that you can join us there. Again, that is youtube.com/jimharold. We’ll post it on all the socials as well, but just wanted to make you aware we’re doing an impromptu St. Patrick’s Day livestream. I may even have a beverage or two, so if you want to tune in and see that, we’ll just have some fun. Laidback, nothing really structured, just going to have some fun. St. Patrick’s Day, 8 p.m. Eastern. That is March 17th. And if you missed it, I’m sure there’ll be a replay – unless I embarrass myself too much. [laughs]
And with that, with no further ado, maybe these are some future favorite Campfire stories. Absolutely some great ones in here, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Next up on the Campfire is Alex from the UK. We’re so glad to speak with her. This is just a really, really neat story. I’m not even going to tell you what it is or give you any hint. I don’t want to ruin it. I’ll let her tell it. It’s an awesome story. Alex, thanks for joining us. I know you’ve been listening for a while and you’re already a Plus Club member, and we appreciate that. So tell us what happened.
ALEX: Hi, Jim. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to speak today. My story goes back to the early 2000s. I was about 14-15 years old, and we were on a local day out as a family. We went to a local tourist attraction, like a living history museum, which I don’t know if you have in the U.S.
JIM HAROLD: Like recreations where they recreate different things, yeah.
ALEX: Yeah. This was a Victorian museum. It’s actually really interesting. They’ve reassembled all the houses brick by brick from around the local county. It’s based on the Victorians living during – they call it the Black Country era, so with coal mining. It’s a really good museum. They’ve got a big high street set out in Victorian times with a pub, bakery, sweet shop, pharmacy. They’ve all been reassembled brick by brick from the local area, and they’ve all got a lot of Victorian items to look at – for instance, in the pharmacy, you can go in and see how they made the medicines and things like that. It’s really cool. All the people that work there as well are all dressed up in their finest Victorian finery, wandering around in character, giving you information about the various shops and things.
We were walking down the high street. We decided to veer off a little bit down round the back of the main street, to the back of the shops. I was walking ahead a bit, being a bit of a typical teenager, not wanting to be seen with my parents. [laughs] Tried to keep a cool distance away from them. I walked into a little courtyard that was just behind the high street and saw the behind the bakery. It was like a little bakehouse inside the courtyard. I stood in the archway of the courtyard and looked into the little bakehouse at the back, and there were two ladies in there, baking some bread.
They both had the full Victorian costume on. You could see the work surfaces. They had some bread on the work surface. They were kneading; there was flour and whatnot. The lady nearest to the door, the entrance to the bakehouse, looked through the window and acknowledged me and made the gesture to wave me in, as if to say, “Come and have a look at what we’re doing.” I thought, “Great, they’re baking some bread back here.” I turned back to my parents and said, “Come this way. They’re doing some baking in here.” Turned back a split second later and there was nothing to be seen. No ladies baking bread, no bread on the surfaces, no flour on the surfaces. The whole scene as such had just disappeared into thin air.
JIM HAROLD: That’s what I was going to ask, the flour. I guess somebody could’ve hastily taken the stuff and left the room, but usually – I don’t know much about baking bread, but I do know this: you’ll have flour on a wooden counter or something. All that was gone, totally clean, looked like it hadn’t been used in whatever amount of time?
ALEX: Yeah. The courtyard was an enclosed courtyard. I was stood in the only entranceway, an archway, and the door to the bakehouse – it was only a small bakehouse. I remember feeling really baffled rather than frightened because as far as I saw it, these ladies were just other people who worked in the museum that were putting on a demonstration. I walked into the little bakehouse and looked around, a bit mystified, and the whole area was completely clear of any materials that would’ve been used to bake bread.
JIM HAROLD: Wow.
ALEX: Interestingly, later on, we went into the actual bakery to buy some bread. I don’t think I really wanted to say at the time because I was a bit of an awkward teenager, but I said to them, “The bakehouse behind here, is that where you bake all the bread to sell to the customers?” They said, “No, unfortunately due to health and safety, it does have to be baked in a behind-the-scenes bakery.” So they didn’t even use that bakehouse to bake bread.
JIM HAROLD: Oh wow. That’s the ultimate verification right there. I think people, when they first hear that story, it’s like, “It was just actors doing it” or whatever. But that’s the ultimate verification – no, you basically saw a glimpse back in time, it sounds like.
ALEX: Yeah. For a long time I thought it was just an experience of seeing some ghosts, but since listening to your podcast, I feel it was more of a time slip than an actual – because it was almost like the whole scene was there and I was glimpsing into a whole scene of time. Because of the flour and the bread. It was just bizarre.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, you wouldn’t think you would see a ghost of flour. [laughs] I think that kind of thing happens. We’ve had people on the shows – if you’ve listened to the older shows, you’ll know that we’ve had people who have experienced really weird time slips where just for a moment, they’ll walk into another time, and then everything will be back to normal. And I think that happens. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, I don’t know if there’s any way to avoid it or bring it on or repeat it, but I just believe that’s a real thing.
ALEX: And they were aware of me as well because the lady acknowledged me and beckoned me in. I do wonder, what did she think of the strange person in modern-day clothing?
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, “What are those weird clothes?” [laughs]
ALEX: I think I was going through a bit of a Goth era as well as a teenager. [laughs] She probably was quite mystified at what I was wearing.
JIM HAROLD: Could be. Alex, thank you so much for telling this delightful story on the Campfire, and stay spooky.
ALEX: Thank you, Jim.
JIM HAROLD: Next up on the Campfire is Helen from Chicago, and she has a story about her sister. Her sister can see something that most of us can’t see, and I find this utterly fascinating. Helen, welcome to the show. Thanks for listening; we appreciate it. Tell us about your sister and her special talent.
HELEN: Hi, Jim. First of all, a little background on my sister. She is very psychic and has had a lot of experience with supernatural with seeing ghosts. One thing I noticed on your show is I don’t hear a lot about, or haven’t heard, is where she can see Death coming for people.
JIM HAROLD: Wow.
HELEN: And she saw Death like three times come for people, so I just wanted to share those experiences with you.
JIM HAROLD: You’ve got me on the edge of my seat. Please tell me what happened.
HELEN: The first time she ever saw Death coming for someone was January 21st, 1969. My dad was rushed to the hospital that morning, and by late afternoon we got a call from the hospital; they said he was fine, he was stable. They wanted to keep him in the hospital for a few days for observation. We were all happy. At this time, my sister was 21 and I was 6. Of course, we had other siblings as well that were as young as I was.
Then probably about 10 p.m., she had an urge to look out the window, and she sees this solid black figure sitting on a banister outside my dad’s bedroom window. She said it was solid, very tall, and it did have a hood. She looked at it a little bit, and again, because of her experiences with supernatural, she was scared but not so freaked out. So she just avoided it and went about her own business. She was in the living room, and then under the door, she sees a mist of smoke come through. It’s seeping underneath the door, and then it comes back into its full form, that same form she saw on the banister. And it glided. It didn’t walk, it glided over to my dad’s bedroom door, and again, it slid under the door, vaporized under the door.
She did not follow it. And my dad wasn’t in the room. He was in the hospital. So that was just a weird experience. She had experienced ghosts at home and stuff, so she just went about her business. Then 1 o’clock in the morning, we got a call that my dad had passed away.
JIM HAROLD: Oh my lord.
HELEN: Yeah. That was her first experience with seeing Death.
JIM HAROLD: And it wasn’t expected in his case? It sounds like they thought he was okay; they were just being careful.
HELEN: Right, it wasn’t expected. They expected him to pull through, and he didn’t. The second time she saw Death, we fast forward to like 1999. It’s nighttime again, and she wakes up and Death is kneeling next to her bed. She immediately screams and says, “Get out of here!” He rises and then he starts gliding toward my bedroom. It’s the same house we live in now. He starts gliding toward my bedroom and now she’s panicking, thinking she sent Death my way. So she screamed, “No!” He did an about-face. Again, he glided down the stairs.
This time she followed him. She followed him out and she saw that he slid, again, underneath the front door, and he glided across the street and he hovered between the two apartment buildings across the street – well, one was an apartment building, one was a house. He stayed in the middle of it and hovered, but in a sitting position. He wasn’t really sitting, but again, same solid figure. And we’re in the city of Chicago, and it’s pretty light. She could see him as plain as day.
She watched him for about an hour, but then she had to go back to bed, so she just avoided it, went back to bed. And then that morning we found out from the caregiver across the street that the lady on the first floor did pass away.
JIM HAROLD: In other words, it seems like Death was coming to get somebody in your house, and then it got discouraged and it went to a neighbor.
HELEN: Yeah, and that’s what we’re trying to figure out, too. It’s like, does Death not know – when he went to get my dad, my dad wasn’t in the bedroom. So it’s like, do they not know exactly when to come? Or what? That’s where our feelings are at.
And then, again, to allude to that, the third time she saw Death was in the daytime. An ambulance had pulled up to my neighbor’s house. This was back in the day when ambulances came first, not the firetrucks, the first people to respond. So the ambulance pulled up to my neighbor’s house. They were in there a long, long time. They did wheel the man out, and she knew he wasn’t dead because his face wasn’t covered and he was hooked up to machines. They went ahead and put him in the ambulance and then they turned the siren on and they were leaving.
Then here, she looks and she sees Death. Death is whooshing by. Her impression was that Death was late getting to the ambulance. And of course, he also died. So those are the three times that she saw Death. I was asking her what they look like exactly, for this call. Like, is it the same Death? She doesn’t know if it’s the same Death. All she knows is with the last one, with our neighbor where he chased the ambulance, she said he was much smaller. She doesn’t know if it was because of the speed he was racing toward the ambulance. So she saw Death three times, and she’s hoping not to see him again anytime too soon.
JIM HAROLD: That has to be really frightening.
HELEN: Yeah, she was frightened. But again, from her experiences through supernatural – she’s seen ghosts and even some evil spirits and stuff. It was scary for her. She’s always scared, and she really doesn’t like any of the – she’ll try to stay away from all the supernatural stuff. She doesn’t encourage it. She doesn’t try to advance her skills in the psychic abilities. She doesn’t do any of that. She really just wants to avoid it all. She’s just hoping she never sees Death again.
JIM HAROLD: Wow. I mean, that’s got to be scary because you’re always wondering, “Am I going to see it tonight?”
HELEN: Yeah. Last night I talked to her a little bit, and I asked her and she goes, “I wonder if I’m going to see it if it comes for me.” I was like, “I don’t know.” But yeah, she saw it three times.
JIM HAROLD: Man. I’ve got to tell you, that is quite a story, Helen, and I wish you and your sister the best. Hopefully she won’t see that again. I wonder if anybody else out there, either them or their loved ones, friends, people they know – do they see Death? Frightening. Frightening indeed. Helen – go ahead.
HELEN: Oh, again, it was a solid black tall figure and it had a hood. You couldn’t see a face or any kind of description. It was just a solid black figure. And her feeling was it was a male.
JIM HAROLD: The Grim Reaper.
JIM HAROLD: Helen, thank you for being a part of the Campfire.
HELEN: Thank you, Jim. Take care now.
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If you love the Campfire, be sure to check out the Paranormal Podcast, where every week Jim interviews experts and authors about strange mysteries. Find it for free wherever you listen to this podcast. Tune in to the Paranormal Podcast today. Now, we return to Jim Harold’s Campfire.
JIM HAROLD: Samuel is on the line from Indiana. His friend Miranda suggested to check in to the Campfire, so Miranda, thank you and stay spooky! Do what Miranda did: tell a friend today about the Campfire, because we get great stories like this. Samuel is going to take us back to his childhood and some real strangeness that ensued. Samuel, welcome to the show. Please tell us what happened.
SAMUEL: Absolutely, Jim. Thank you for having me. This took place in the early ’90s. I was born in ’86, and I was possibly seven or eight at the most. My uncle passed away when I was nine, so it was before that, I know. My dad and my uncle were really close. My dad would always go out to my uncle’s house to visit after work. They worked together. They always had some kind of project they were working on, and I would tag along. Because I was so young, it was easy for me to get bored out at my uncle’s house. There was no television, video games, anything like that. So I was mostly left to my own devices, wandering around the yard, that sort of thing.
It was about mid-autumn, and my uncle lived out in a rural area. I lived in Southern Indiana, just along the Illinois border, and just on the opposite side of my uncle’s property was a tree line, woods going way back. Somewhere way back, like miles back, was nature trails, that sort of thing. My uncle had a little setup out by the tree line that was a beer cooler and a couple of lawn chairs. He would sit out there and plink away with guns. He was kind of a gun nut. He had some targets out there on the trees in the woods.
So I was sitting on his beer cooler, just waiting for my dad and uncle to get done with whatever they were doing, and I noticed some movement out of the corner of my eye. When I turned, on the surface of my dad’s cooler – it was my dad’s cooler, I believe. It might’ve been my uncle’s. But on the surface of the cooler, there was a worm. When I say it was a worm, I mean it was a strange worm. It was about two or three inches in length. It looked in some way synthetic. Like it almost looked as though it were made of like rubber or plastic, but it was moving like it was alive.
The way that it was moving is it would start flat and straight, and then it would curl into a ‘U’ shape and then flip up into an arch, so it looked like it was standing on two feet, and then it would fall over, almost like a jump rope going over and over.
JIM HAROLD: Huh.
SAMUEL: The colors on this thing were bright neon. At first, I thought it was like a fishing lure, when I was a kid, because that’s just what it looked like to me. But it was moving, and this was confusing to me, so I determined it was alive. I’d never seen anything like this. Like I said, it was a rural community. Spent a lot of time outside catching snakes and bugs and what have you out there. I’d never seen anything like this, so I determined I was going to catch it, take it to my dad for investigation.
As I reached out to it, there was this real sense of dread, and I noticed the movement didn’t seem to look right. In my head, I was thinking it looked almost like claymation, Gumby, kind of. I work up the courage to finally grab it, and as soon as I touch it, it’s gone. It takes off at incredible speed. I wasn’t really able to follow its motion, but I saw the leaves in the trees split, like something was moving really fast through them. Not in the trees, but on the ground.
This startled me, and also it kind of burned. Like you know when you’re picking up something out of the microwave and it’s too hot, and you’re like, “Ooh, I’ve got to let go of that quick”? It was that kind of a feeling when I touched it. So now I’m excited. I’m a kid; I just found a weird worm that moves like a bullet. So I take off into the woods. I kick around in the leaves, looking for it for a little bit. Of course, there’s no sign of it. I was looking for a worm in a pile of autumn leaves. [laughs]
I remember I walked back up to my dad and my uncle, and they’re surrounding the picnic table, doing some kind of weird adult activity that I didn’t know anything about. My uncle was a collector; he probably had a new gun or a fishing pole or motorcycle parts or something that he and my dad were checking out. I go up to my dad and I’m like, “Dad, I just saw this weird worm!” He goes, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever kid.” I’m saying, “No, man, it was really weird.” My dad’s ‘just saying, “Yeah, whatever. Cool, you saw a worm.” I go off and look for it a little bit more, and I decide, “Dad’s distracted now. I’ll ask him again in the truck on the way home.” I describe the worm to him and he goes, “I don’t know what to tell you. Cool. You saw a worm.” He’s blowing me off.
The years go by, and I keep thinking about this incident. I tell other people the story. I’m telling them, “Have you ever seen a worm like this?” I go online, I do a little bit of research every now and then. About this time, I was getting a little older. Probably about nine or ten, I started watching The X-Files, and I started thinking to myself, “I’ve just seen a cryptid.” So I start doing research into cryptids online, and the closest thing I found to what I saw was a thing called a rod, if you’ve ever heard of those?
JIM HAROLD: Yes, I have heard of rods. Yes.
SAMUEL: They’re these little crinkly accordion-looking worm things with little Jell-O wings. Picture the shape of almost a little cross. But that wasn’t what I saw. A big thing I wanted to do coming on your show was to tell my story and see if anybody else has seen one of these things. I’ve got a few theories about what it could’ve been.
JIM HAROLD: What do you think?
SAMUEL: Well, the realistic answer – I said that it looked like a fishing lure. So if it was, that means there was some weirdo in the woods trying to catch a kid with a fishing lure. So that’s a scary story in itself. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: Yes.
SAMUEL: If it was an actual creature, it was a rare creature that not many people know about. Or – and this is kind of crackpotty. I’m a bit of a crackpot, I’ll be the first to admit.
JIM HAROLD: Me too, me too.
SAMUEL: See? Exactly. That’s why I wanted to be on your show. [laughs] I listen to your show, I listen to Astonishing Legends, I listen to a lot of people talk about their experiences, and the more you listen to these stories, the more you realize that there’s a common thread no matter what you’re talking about – cryptids, UFOs, ghosts, demons, whatever. It’s my little theory that these things are all related, if not one and the same.
Last year, I read Incident at Devil’s Den by Terry Lovelace. I’m sure some of your listeners probably relate to that book or that story. Terry talks about his alien encounters, being abducted by aliens, through the lens of – the things that took him, he refers to as “the Monkey Men.” They were these little creatures that would come into his room, and as he got older, he realized they were probably Alien Greys, but as a child, he didn’t have that touchstone.
JIM HAROLD: Frame of reference, yeah.
SAMUEL: Right, so his head told him they were little circus monkeys. I think that when somebody sees something they can’t understand in our world, they are seeing something that we’re just not equipped to put together, and pareidolia does the rest.
JIM HAROLD: That makes a lot of sense, Samuel. And it would explain a whole range of phenomena.
SAMUEL: Sure. There’s a thought experiment by a scholar named Edwin Abbott. He was a guy in the 1800s and he wrote a short story called “Flatland.” Are you familiar with that?
JIM HAROLD: I’ve not read it, but I’m aware of it.
SAMUEL: Basically, in a two-dimensional world, a square and a triangle are talking and the square says, “I saw the weirdest thing. I saw five dots that slowly expanded and turned into one circle, and then that circle shrunk, then turned into a dot, and disappeared.” The triangle says, “You’re crazy.” But really, what the square saw was an apple – the five points of the apple going out into the body and then finally the tiny stem and then it disappeared. The square is not a three-dimensional object, so he thinks he’s seeing a ghost, an alien, a critter of some kind.
I think that’s a lot of the time what happens to us. I think that I was lucky in that I found something without intelligence. I truly think I found something like a bug or a worm or a thing that my brain couldn’t let me see, if that makes any sense.
JIM HAROLD: I think it makes a lot of sense. Great call, Samuel. You’ve given us a lot to think about, and I love that analogy. It’s kind of like if you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and if you’re a human, everything you can’t understand looks like what you can make sense of. That in itself makes a lot of sense. Samuel, thank you so much for calling and for giving us something to think about, and if you ever figure out what that worm was all about, let us know.
SAMUEL: Absolutely. Thank you.
JIM HAROLD: Next up on the Campfire is Heather from Ontario, Canada. Boy, we’re getting a lot of calls from Canada lately, and I absolutely love it. Heather is going to take us back to her teenage years and tell us about some happenings back then. Heather, thank you for joining us and please tell us what happened.
HEATHER: Thank you for having me. When I was 16 years old, I found out I was pregnant. A few days later, my father passed away unexpectedly. He was sick, but he wasn’t on his deathbed or anything, so it was very surprising to everybody. Needless to say, I couldn’t really tell anybody about my little situation at the time. Anyways, I told my sister-in-law and then I swore her to secrecy and just made the best of it as things went along throughout the funeral and everything.
My mother was already mad at me because I had run away from home and I was gone for several months and came back. Anyways, I was really a bad kid. I was kind of an a******. I just didn’t want to be there. Anyways, shortly after the funeral – actually, I think it was the night of the funeral – I was at the next-door neighbor’s. They had two kids; one was my age and one was three or four years younger. She had her friend over and they were playing with a Ouija board. I was just sitting there watching them. They were doing what 12- or 13-year-old girls do, and they were asking, “Who does Joanie like?” and that kind of stuff.
I said, “Why don’t you ask it a question you don’t know the answer to?” They both looked at me and said, “Why don’t you give it a question?” I said, “Okay, why don’t you ask it where my dad’s buried?” Just so you get the context of that, in the city at the time, there were only a few cemeteries, and the one where my dad was going was brand new. It was on the outskirts of town. And this girl was like 12 or 13, and I don’t think there’s any way that she would’ve ever even heard of it. And if she had heard of it, she would’ve only known it by the first two names, not the last one, because that’s how it was referred.
Anyways, as soon as I said that, “Where’s my dad buried?”, that little disc started flying across the board, and they were stunned because obviously they weren’t doing it. It shocked them so much that they weren’t even really paying attention to what it was spelling out, but I was sitting there and watching it, and it spelled out “Capital Memorial Gardens,” which is bang on, exactly where my dad was.
JIM HAROLD: Wow.
HEATHER: I almost fell off the chair. I couldn’t believe it. They kept saying, “The disc is heating up. Feel the disc.” I’m like, “Uh yeah, no, thanks. I don’t want to feel the disc, thank you.” [laughs] When they were doing, they were like, “Oh my God, I wonder what it said. I couldn’t get all the letters.” They looked at me and they said, “Did you get it?” I said, “Yep.” They said, “Was it right?” I said, “Yep. I’ve got to go home now.” So I went home. I was so freaked out. I’m a skeptic. I’m not a nonbeliever, but that was just a little bit too much considering everything else that had just happened.
Anyways, I thought about it all day long, and then finally I managed to push it out of my mind before I went to bed. I thought, “Okay, good.” I go to bed and I’m sleeping, and I can hear a song. The song is called “Boris the Spider” by The Who. There’s a chorus in there and it goes, “Creepy, crawly, creepy creepy crawly crawly,” and it just gets louder and louder and then all of a sudden it abruptly ends. I still remember, I’m sleeping and the song is in there, and I’m like, “I don’t like The Who, so why is this happening?” The sound kept getting higher and higher and higher. I was like, “Uh-oh.” Then the song abruptly stopped and my bed slammed into the wall.
JIM HAROLD: Oh my.
HEATHER: I’m lying there, and I have a double headboard, but a single bed, if you can picture that. The bed is directly in the center of the headboard. My bed did have casters on it because my mother wanted to do that so that it was easier to move the bed to make the bed and change the sheets and vacuum and all that stuff. The bed was a foot from the wall, I’d say, and I had shag carpet. It was the ’80s. So the casters didn’t move too quickly or too much because of the shag carpet.
Anyways, I lay there and I was terrified. I was a bit of a baby. Everything scared me. So I was lying there and I had my eyes closed; I was too scared to open them. I thought, “Okay, what if I get up and I grab the door handle, and whatever this force is doesn’t let me out?” I’m just panicking. Then all of a sudden I get this picture in my head of my dad, and he’s furious and staring at me. He didn’t say anything. I was like, “Okay, that’s the energy that flung my bed against the wall. There’s no doubt in my mind that he knows my dirty little secret and he is furious about it.”
I got up – keep in mind that my mother was really mad. I think she probably hated me at the time, but I’m not sure. So I got up and I bolted across the hall, and I jumped into bed with her as quietly as I could, because she was a very light sleeper. But I managed to wake her up anyways. She goes, “What the hell are you doing?” I said, “I just slammed against the wall.” She didn’t say anything for a couple seconds, and then she got up and went, “Don’t be ridiculous.” She walked across the hall. There was no noise in the house, so I could hear her. She went, “Oh.” Then she came back into her bedroom and she completely ignored me and lay down.
Couple of minutes later, she goes, “Your bed’s against the wall.” I go, “Yeah. That’s why I’m here.” She didn’t say anything else to me. The next morning, she got up at 4 o’clock in the morning or whatever she does. I woke up and before I opened my eyes, I thought, “Was that real?” I open my eyes and sure enough, I’m in my mom’s room. I’m like, “Okay, that was real.” I got up and went and looked in my bedroom, and the bed was still against the wall. I had to move it back.
So that was my creepy story. My mother never spoke about it again. She never spoke to me for the next couple of days. She was nice to me in front of any guests that were coming over or whatever, but she still didn’t talk to me for a few days. I don’t recall us ever speaking about that ever again. I’ve told so many people about it, and they’re like, “Yeah, okay, whatever.” I’m like, well, whatever.
JIM HAROLD: So you think that was your dad expressing his displeasure?
HEATHER: Oh, absolutely. My father was a very volatile person. He had a very bad, bad temper. If he was still living, he probably would’ve thrown me across the room. But he couldn’t do that, so I guess he just did it with the bed. As soon as it spelled out where he was buried, I knew that something got disturbed. I couldn’t stop thinking about that all day because, like I said, there’s virtually no way these kids would’ve known that. And if they had ever heard of it, they would’ve heard of it as “Capital Memorial.” Even now, half the people that live in the city – the cemetery’s been there for 37, 40 years, and most people call it “Capital Memorial.” They don’t even realize that there’s a “Gardens” on the end of it. So the fact that it spelled out all three words was terrifying.
JIM HAROLD: That is strange indeed. Thank you so much, Heather, for sharing your story. I appreciate it. And thank you for being a part of the Campfire.
HEATHER: Thank you for having me on.
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JIM HAROLD: Next up on the line is a longtime listener – about 10 years, Michael has been listening. He’s from Oklahoma, and we’re so glad to have him on. You would think moving into a new apartment would be an exciting and fun thing, but Michael’s had some strange experiences, and he’s going to tell us about this new apartment and what happened. Michael, welcome to the show. Thank you for your longtime listenership, and tell us what happened.
MICHAEL: Thank you, Mr. Harold. In 2001, my wife was about eight months pregnant and my job moved me from Oklahoma to Arizona. We moved into a new apartment pretty much sight unseen. I made all the arrangements remotely. She brought her friend with her. We got a three-bedroom. Shortly after we moved in, I thought I saw something in the hallway. It was rather strange. It was a tall man who moved from the bathroom directly across the hall into a bedroom. That was the room that my wife’s friend was going to be sleeping in.
I didn’t say anything because my wife was eight or nine months pregnant. I didn’t want to freak her out. I just kept it to myself because I have a long history of catching things out of the corner of my eye and seeing things. But then my wife started having – they call it sleep paralysis, where she was unable to move and felt like there was this presence over her. And she didn’t tell me, but she had also seen this figure in the hallway. But she didn’t want me to think she was crazy from being pregnant or something, so she didn’t say anything.
Her friend decided she had to move out. She didn’t tell us why because she didn’t want to freak out my wife, who was pregnant, but she had seen the same figure going into her room, and she wasn’t going to sleep there anymore.
Move forward to the time my wife’s in the hospital delivering, and my parents are traveling from Oklahoma City to Tucson to come and stay with us for a few days and see the new baby and everything. I give them the keys so they could go back to the apartment and freshen up and sleep there, and my dad comes back the next day and says, “Why didn’t you tell me your apartment was haunted?”
JIM HAROLD: Wow. [laughs]
MICHAEL: I said, “What do you mean?” I didn’t want to say anything to shade what he described or what he saw. He saw this tall man moving from the bathroom to this bedroom. He was wearing jeans and a work shirt. My wife went white because that was exactly what she and I had both seen, but we hadn’t told each other. This was the first time all three of us were talking about what we had seen, and this is the same presence that these felt standing over her when she was having the sleep paralysis.
JIM HAROLD: Wow. So multiple people saw it. This was not just one person. It sounds like everybody connected with the apartment saw it, basically.
JIM HAROLD: Any thoughts as to what it was? Did you find out anything about the history of the place or anything that would give you some solutions as to “Who is this apparition running around my new apartment?”
MICHAEL: We thought about – several friends had said maybe it was an Indian burial ground or some ancient site. But he was wearing jeans and a modern work shirt, so it didn’t seem like it was something maybe historical or that far out of time. The complex didn’t seem like it was that old, either. Tucson had expanded quite a bit. This was near the edge, so it was a newly developed area. I really have no idea what was going on there and never looked in to see if anybody has complained about issues since. We moved shortly after that. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: Can’t say that I blame you. That can be stressful. You see somebody in your apartment and you think, “Is this an intruder? Is this a very human person? Or is this this ghost again?” And having a small child, I would seem like that would be a natural reaction, to get out as soon as possible.
MICHAEL: Over the last 20 years, my memory of what it was that I saw has evolved from different movies and things. Your memory changes a little bit. But my wife, when I was asking them about this so they could refresh my memory on their experience from their perspective, she mentioned something that I had completely forgotten about. This was adding to her terror at the time: the figure was dragging an axe.
JIM HAROLD: Ooh.
MICHAEL: Even though our hallway and that room and that area was all carpeted, when she was having the night terrors, she could hear the sound of what she thought was an axe being dragged across concrete.
JIM HAROLD: Wow, wow, wow. Now, I’m going to throw a wrench into this. I want to ask you your opinion about this idea. Are you familiar with the term “tulpas”?
MICHAEL: No, I’ve not heard that one.
JIM HAROLD: A tulpa is like a thought form. It’s something that can be created by thought, generated by thought. There’s a famous experiment – I encourage everybody to look it up – it’s called the Philip Experiment, that happened up in Canada. Basically, this group of people – I think it was in the ’70s – got together, and they wanted to see if they could generate a ghost. And they did. Let me ask you this: do you think that your wife may have been in a very – a time when a lot’s going on, could have – not imagined – I’m not saying imagined this; could she somehow have generated it and created it?
MICHAEL: I don’t generally believe that ghosts are spirits that are left behind. I don’t necessarily know what they are, but the idea that this might’ve been some kind of a psychic projection or created out of her anxiety and feelings certainly seems as plausible as any other idea.
JIM HAROLD: Again, this is no insult to your wife whatsoever. It’s not saying anything negative about her. The thing that I’ve come to believe about all this stuff – I do, for example, believe that people who pass on can get messages to us. I believe that. But I also believe there’s other explanations. I’m not saying this is the right explanation. I’m just throwing it out there as something to think about. I think we think of things like apparitions and ghosts as this one thing and that’s it, and I think there’s more to it than that. Just my personal opinion. Just thought I’d throw that out there as another thing to think about.
And again, I can’t stress this enough: no shade on your wife. Nothing negative about your wife or anything. But there have been some really interesting situations where it’s been said that things can be projected and created. Not imagined, but actually created where other people see them. David Weatherly, the great researcher and author, has done a lot of interesting work on that.
Michael, thank you so much for joining us today. I appreciate it. And thank you for being a part of the Campfire. I guess what I should’ve asked you, before we go – have you ever seen this man again? Or it was just at that apartment?
MICHAEL: It was just at that apartment, although we have had other experiences, perhaps for another time.
JIM HAROLD: Very good. Michael, thank you so much for being a part of the Campfire.
MICHAEL: Thank you, sir.
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You’re listening to Jim Harold’s Campfire.
JIM HAROLD: You know, I love this thing we’ve been doing with other podcasters where they come in and tell their spooky stories, and today we have two great guests to do that. Two Girls One Ghost. That’s the name of their podcast. I’m talking about Corinne and Sabrina, and each of them have a great Campfire story to share with us – and they’ll tell us a little bit about their show, too. Corinne, Sabrina, thank you for joining us today.
CORINNE: Thanks, Jim.
SABRINA: Thank you for having us. We’re so excited.
JIM HAROLD: It’s so good to talk to other podcasters about their own spooky experiences. Corinne was going to go first, she said. She’s the brave one.
CORINNE: Yes. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: So Corinne, tell us your spooky story on the Campfire.
SABRINA: Corinne is also the most haunted one.
CORINNE: I have to be somewhat brave because there are ghost stories from before I can even remember anything about my life that my parents have told me, as a haunted baby. But we’re going to fast forward to college. Sabrina and I met in college. We went to Loyola Marymount University, and that university is haunted. So many colleges are so haunted, and it’s a topic people don’t talk enough about.
My junior year, I was one of seven people who lived in a house that we were renting off of campus. This house was huge. It was up on the bluff in Los Angeles, looking over Marina del Rey area. Super beautiful, dazzling house. Anyone would want to live here.
SABRINA: The nicest house we’ll ever live in.
CORINNE: It was the nicest house we’ll probably ever live in. I don’t know why they were renting it to college kids, but they did, and I got to live there. But the way that the house was set up was the first floor was basically a secondary living room that we didn’t really use, and then there was a hallway of bedrooms. On the second floor, that was where our main dining room, our kitchen, our living room, and one master bedroom was. Two girls slept in the master bedroom. One of those girls was my friend Marissa. I was sleeping downstairs the majority of the time.
All of the people in this house knew that I grew up in a haunted house, knew that I’d experienced the paranormal before, but it wasn’t like a main topic for us. I mostly talked about ghosts with Sabrina. We were the ghost buddies together. So I didn’t bring it up to anybody that when we had moved into this house, I started seeing something. It was a small shadow figure that was probably four feet tall. I would only see it at night, which was really, really scary because – I mean, it’s scary no matter when you see a shadow figure, right?
JIM HAROLD: Sure.
CORINNE: But the second story was just a row of windows. It was a beautiful house and we had huge windows all around, and I never saw the shadow figure standing normally, in front of me or anywhere. I would only see its reflection darting past the second story windows. It couldn’t be anything outside because we were 14 feet up in the air at this point. I got really nervous when I would see that thing, but I would just try to ignore it because in my experience, the more you ignore the spirits, the less that they’ll bother you. So I was trying not to ring any alarm bells here.
Maybe a month after I’d first seen the shadow person, and had been seeing it pretty consistently at night, I’m in the car with Marissa, who is sleeping on the second story. She is nervous and she’s a little bit awkward, and she’s saying, “I feel like there’s something happening in our house.” I was like, “Oh, what do you think?” She was like, “I saw something. It was…” I was like, “Was it a small black shadow figure?” She was like,” Yes! Yes!” She started tearing up. What I didn’t know was she had experienced, in the bathroom, on the second story where I had been seeing the spirits and where she had a bedroom – she was in the bathroom and she saw this thing come up to her – it was chest-height – and push her.
SABRINA: [gasps] Oh!
CORINNE: It touched the back of her head and slammed her head forward as she’s looking in the mirror.
JIM HAROLD: Yikes.
CORINNE: So she was really, really scared at this point. I was like, “That’s screwed up. Just try not to pay attention to it. Maybe this thing will go away.” Now a few more weeks pass by. Not a ton of activity, but obviously she’s a little bit freaked out being in our house. We had an event that we’d all gone to, this dance and drinking event. I had been a little bit under the weather, so I hadn’t drunk at all. So I was super alert. I came back early to the house, and I was sitting in the upstairs living room with another friend. We hear the front door open and we hear Marissa go, [gasp] “Hello? Hello?!” I’m like, “Marissa, we’re up here, we’re up here!”
She comes up. She’s in tears. She had left the party early as well to come home and had taken the car keys of our other roommate. This roommate is super religious, super Catholic, and has a St. Anthony charm on her keys. The key ring that was all metal didn’t even break, but somehow this charm had dropped exactly where the entrance was into the home. So while Marissa was holding it, it dropped. And I heard it drop when I was upstairs. So for some reason, this saintly charm wasn’t allowed to enter with Marissa. She’s freaked out.
I had her go into her bed, and I sat in her bed and I led her through this technique that I use called the ribbon wrapping technique. I don’t know if that’s actually what it’s called, but I use it, where you visualize a ribbon or a string or something starting at the top of your head, and basically making its way all around you, protecting you until it ties off at the bottom of your feet. I’ve used this when I’ve experienced really scary paranormal activity before, and it helps I guess block me off, close me off to that activity. So I led her through it, I gave her a gold cross necklace to wear. We were just altogether freaked out.
The next day, she had reached out to our friend Mike, who was also attending the same college, who had a really good family friend who did cleansings and was a medium and had a lot of experience communing with the dead. She reaches out to Mike and is like, “Hey, I might need to get the number of your family friend. I think we have something serious going on.” They’re in talks about this woman coming and cleansing our house, and when Marissa goes back to the text messages with Mike to look at them, from her, there is a text that had been sent to Mike, and the word is a word she never recognized. She’s never written that. But the text was sent.
So we look up the word, her and I together in the kitchen, and it comes up, and it basically means “cluster of freckles.” I can’t for the life of me remember what this word is, but that’s essentially what it means. And Marissa, on her arm, has a cluster – she has a few freckles elsewhere, but she has almost like a birthmark of intensely densely clustered freckles on her forearm. So now we’re s******* ourselves. We’re like, “Holy crap, you’ve been marked, girl. This demon’s coming for you!”
I feel bad saying that we don’t really have any closure with this story, but I did see the shadow figure a few times more. Marissa never felt quite alone at that house. But we didn’t ever banish it or cleanse our space. [laughs] So until we moved out, that thing was with us.
JIM HAROLD: What do you think it was? Was it a kid because it was four foot tall? You think that’s what it was?
CORINNE: I got much more demonic vibes from it. I don’t know if it was –
JIM HAROLD: Ooh, a little demon. Yikes.
CORINNE: I think it was a demon. I do tend to think that all little ghostlike children are demons because I don’t really trust that anything is really truly presenting as a kid half the time. But this one, I’ve seen shadow people before, I’ve experienced it since I was little, and this one felt very nefarious. And it shoved the back of Marissa’s head, so we’re like, okay, it’s making physical contact.
JIM HAROLD: That’s the thing. When it starts getting physical and starts potentially – because if it went far enough she’d hit her head on the mirror, that’s getting serious. A little nudge here, a misplaced something there, a door that opens, that’s kind of spooky, but it’s different – that’s like a line that it crossed, kind of like “I am going to physically impact you in a negative way.” That’s a whole different – a little demon, ooh.
CORINNE: And that was just a small cluster of what we experience in college and in those homes. Sabrina’s experienced plenty of paranormal stuff as well.
JIM HAROLD: That’s what I was going to say. Sabrina, that’s a good one to have to live up to, so tell us your spooky story for us on the Campfire tonight.
SABRINA: Yeah, I have had quite a few experiences in the dreamscape. I’ve even astral projected. But the story I’m going to tell you about is one that I’ve told Corinne. Corinne has heard it many times. Our listeners have probably heard it a lot. It’s a story that happened when I was like four and lasted for a few years.
When I was four, I moved into a new house with my family in New Jersey. It was a brand new house, brand new build, built upon old farmland. So we were the first people to live there. Within the first couple of days of living there, I had a nightmare. In this nightmare, I woke up as I had gone to sleep. My room was the exact same way I had left it when I went to sleep; I was wearing the same pajamas. I would feel this presence in my doorway, and I just got the feeling that I needed to follow it.
So I would follow it down the hallway to my sister’s room, who’s two years older than I am, so she was six at the time. When I got to my sister’s room and opened the door, I would see these black-and-white orbs fighting over her, like diving down, fighting over her. I’d always wake up at that moment. It was scary. It instilled fear into me. I had this nightmare reoccurring for a couple of years, and I never really thought much of it. We used to joke that my sister was possessed because she was a little bit temperamental.
But then fast forward, I’m 21 years old, graduating college, and I’m at dinner with my dad, my sister, and brother, and we’re talking about reoccurring nightmares. I tell them this one, and my dad looks at me and is like, “That wasn’t a dream. That happened in real life.” I’m like, wait a second, record scratch, “What are you talking about?” He goes on to tell me that when we first moved into this house, so when I was four, he had fallen asleep on the couch and woke up in the middle of the night to a strange noise. He has a ton of paranormal experiences, is very open to the other side, and he just had this weird gut feeling. But he was like, “Maybe it’s just the TV. It’s a new house. I’m not used to it.” He turns the TV off and starts going through the downstairs, making sure all the doors and windows are closed and locked, and starts going upstairs.
Immediately as he starts climbing the stairs, he gets that feeling that someone else is in the house – someone who should not be in the house, that there’s some bad intent – [cat meows]. My cat is…
JIM HAROLD: That’s all right.
SABRINA: She is a chatty girl. She’s on our show all the time. The second he starts walking up the stairs, he starts to feel like someone else is in the house, and he’s getting bad vibes. But he’s like, “My wife and my kids are upstairs, so I need to go check on them.” He checks on me; I’m asleep. He checks on my mom; she’s asleep. And as he starts down the hallway, that feeling is getting more and more intense. The house is getting colder and colder. He reaches my sister’s room, and he said the door handle was ice cold.
He opens the door, and all of the air is sucked out of the room. His gut is telling him to run, to get out of there, but my sister is sleeping on the bed. So he approaches her, and as he approaches her, my sister, asleep, eyes closed, opens her mouth and says, [deep growling tone] “Get out!”
JIM HAROLD: Oh, your sister says this?
SABRINA: My sister, in a deep, guttural voice.
JIM HAROLD: That’s like shades of Linda Blair in The Exorcist. “Get out!”
SABRINA: I know. [laughs] Get out. Horrifying. So my dad fortunately stayed, and basically shook my sister and said to whatever it was, “Leave my daughter alone.” My sister wakes up and has no recollection, no idea what’s going on. He picks her up and he’s like, “I’m going to take you to sleep with your mom and I.” He turns around, and I’m standing there in the doorway, sleepwalking.
So I was dreaming this experience – I mean, I was witnessing it, but my brain was processing it as a dream of my dad being this good white orb, and this demon being the black darkness, fighting over my sister for her soul. My dad got the house blessed the next day, and as far as we know, that evil entity didn’t do anything else.
JIM HAROLD: I just want to know what those people on that farm were doing before. That’s my question. It’s like, whoa. [laughs]
SABRINA: I know. We had a mom and a son ghost as well, which we had a bunch of other stories with, but they were good. So I don’t know what this darkness was.
JIM HAROLD: Wow. Whew. Two great stories. Two Girls One Ghost. Or, as the case may be, one demon, or maybe two demons, actually, I guess. Two Girls Two Demons. But anyway, great stories, Corinne and Sabrina. Tell us about Two Girls One Ghost the podcast – what it is and where people can find it.
CORINNE: It’s a paranormal comedy podcast. Sabrina and I host it. We have researched episodes that come out every single week where we discuss haunted places, haunted stories, and just try to dive as deep as we can to uncover some hidden tidbits that people haven’t heard before about certain places and people and ghosts. And then we also have other episodes that we call “Encounters,” where we read everybody’s emails that they send us with everything paranormal and macabre that they experience. It’s people having sexual relations with Fae to alien abductions to demon possession to visits from loved ones, all of the above.
SABRINA: And just as a little warning, we like to call – well, we don’t like, but we do call our podcast the most haunted podcast in America because our listeners have reported having quite a few hauntings while listening to our show.
CORINNE: We’ve been blamed often. [laughs]
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, isn’t that a weird thing? That is a weird thing, I’ve got to tell you, because I’ve had people say similar things like they’re listening to Campfire and weird things happen. It’s like, ooh, what am I bringing in with this? But it’s interesting.
CORINNE: I know, we’re like, are we provoking the spirits or are people that are listening to our shows just opening themselves up more, becoming more receptive?
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, are they more open to it. Good point. So the big question is – I’m sure it’s all the usual places, but tell people anywhere you would like to direct them and all the podcast apps and all that stuff.
SABRINA: Yeah, Spotify, iTunes, Stitchr. I think we’re on all of those. We have social media as well. TikTok, Instagram, @TwoGirlsOneGhost.
CORINNE: And you can check out our website, twogirlsoneghost.com, for any updates. See what we’re up to, any live shows in the future, things like that.
JIM HAROLD: Excellent. Corinne, Sabrina, thank you for joining us. I hope everybody checks out Two Girls One Ghost, and stay spooky.
SABRINA: Thanks, Jim!
JIM HAROLD: Surana is on the line from Massachusetts. She said she was a listener way back in the beginning of the shows, and then she kind of stepped away, and now she is back, and we are so glad to speak with her. She has multiple stories. Today she’s going to take us back to when she was around six or seven years old in Chicago, and tell us a very strange story indeed. We’re so glad to have her on the program. Surana, welcome back as a listener. I guess you’ve been listening for another three years now, so appreciate that, and as a storyteller. Please tell us what happened.
SURANA: Hello, Jim. Thank you so much. This is a story – again, I was between six and seven years old. My parents had taken me to I guess a party. It was a big party. I remember they valeted cars and things, and it was this huge white mansion type antebellum house with the big white pillars. I remember walking in the front door, and it was just me, and I was holding on to my mother’s hand. I didn’t see any kids.
But then I saw this little girl at the top of the stairs. I peered around my mom to see and wave hi because, “Oh, there’s another person to play with” – and she took a few steps down the stairs and grabbed her throat. I grabbed my throat, and I couldn’t breathe. It was as if someone was choking me, is what she was showing me. I couldn’t breathe, and I was just beside myself. Eventually that feeling passed. She came down to the landing, and then she disappeared. But in that moment, she had shown me so much and communicated so much to me about what had happened to her.
I was hysterical as a little girl, and I kept saying to my mom in tears, I’m crying, “Mommy, he killed her! Mommy, he killed her! He killed her! Why did he kill her?” As I’m walking, my mother’s trying to console me, and there was a man standing next to her, and I grabbed his hand and said, “Why did he kill her?” His face just went pale. He went completely pale and walked into the other room. My mother said, “Kenny, go get the car.” They went and brought the car around. I was just traumatized because I felt so bad for this little girl, knowing how she had been killed.
They put me in the car and I was hysterically crying the entire way home, like, “Mommy, I’ve got to help her! I have to help her!” I don’t remember much else of the day except that I was just distraught, completely distraught. But after that, I guess I was asking incessantly to go back to the house so that I could help her. I said, “Mommy, I need to help her. Mommy, somebody killed her. I need to help her.” She was like, “Surana, you were terrified.” I said, “Mommy, I wasn’t scared. She wasn’t trying to hurt me. She just wanted me to know what happened.” She was like, “No, you’re not going back there.”
I guess I asked one too many times, and whatever was in her hands, she just slammed them down and was like, “You are not going back to that house. Don’t ask again.” I was like, “But Mommy, you know I don’t lie. Why don’t you believe me?” She said, “Surana, if I believe you, I have to change so many things about the way I think about things and the way that the world is, and I’m not going to do that.” I was like, “Oh, okay.” I didn’t know what to do with that.
But I did have a dream – I don’t know how much longer afterward I had this dream because I was still trying to get back to her energetically. I had this dream, and I didn’t remember this dream until I started typing out this story for your show, and then it all started coming back to me and I remembered why I didn’t want to remember this dream, because I was really scared. I was very scared in this dream.
It was this shed. In this dream, there was a little girl and she was standing behind the shed, in the darker part of a woods. I was walking toward her, and I could see this shed, and she stepped forward. She pointed to her right, where the shed was, and I looked at that and I stopped because I was scared. Then I looked down at my feet, and they weren’t my feet. I wasn’t a little girl any longer; I was a lady wearing a white dress with white – they looked like ballerina shoes, I guess, like white slippers.
I looked down at that and I looked at her and I gestured for her to walk forward to me. She did walk forward to me. She grabbed my hand – oh my gosh, I got the chills just thinking about this. She grabbed my hand, and I could see an image of the man. I don’t know if her body was in that shed. I don’t know if she was found there. But that is where it happened. That much I did know. I do remember holding her hand, and I was just walking into some white light, and that was the last time that I had any kind of continuous thought about it. I felt like I had done my job, I guess. I’d done something good for her.
But it was just so scary, because as a little girl, I could feel – I’m pretty extreme empath, psychic kind of empath, and I could feel all of her fear as she was pointing to that shed. And then when she grabbed my hand, I got that image of that man. I was just trying my best to stay calm and I was like, “It’s okay, we’ll just walk this way,” and we walked into this bright, bright light that I can remember. She went forward. Of course, I was still standing there in the grass. But yeah, it was truly traumatizing. And I didn’t tell anybody about the dream because nobody wanted to hear about it. I didn’t tell my mom about it because we’d pretty much ended that conversation. But I had pushed that dream to the back of my mind because I was really scared in that dream as a little girl.
I used to be pretty fearless. I wasn’t really scared of a lot of things, a lot of people. But that dream, I was really scared going into those woods to find her.
JIM HAROLD: Sure, it would seem like it would be very frightening.
SURANA: It was, as a little girl, yes. It really was. I think that’s why I didn’t really keep this dream at the forefront of my memory. But as I was typing it out, I was like, oh my gosh, I do remember that dream with the shed. Where I grew up here in Massachusetts, my friend’s father had a shed where he would do his work and stuff. And I knew there was nothing wrong with the shed, but it always gave me the creeps because it was like that patchwork kind of – tiles here, different colored boards there, just to keep it sheltered. When I remembered that I had that dream, I went, “That’s why Frank’s shed used to always creep me out, because of the dream I had of that little girl where she was killed.”
JIM HAROLD: You’re utterly convinced this happened, this girl was killed.
SURANA: Yes, I am.
JIM HAROLD: I think, if it’s relatively brief, we have time for another story. You had another story from your childhood when you went to a theater, when you went to see a play and something very odd happened. But this time you had some verification.
SURANA: Oh yes, absolutely. It’s Chicago, so what do you do on a Friday or Saturday or any night of the week, actually? You can go see a play, just about anywhere. My parents were taking me to see this play and I was very excited to go. I don’t remember the name of it. We walked into the theater, and just as we walked into the doors where you could see the stage, I stopped. I said, “Mommy, I’m not going in there.” She said, “Why?” I said, “I’m not going in there, I’m not going in there” My mother did not like a scene, so basically it was like, “She’s about to have a meltdown. We’re going to get her out of here.” I was like, “I’m not going in there.” I was just terrified.
As we were leaving, I grabbed a man’s hand as he was going into the theater and I said, “Don’t go in there!” He just looked at me and he said, “Okay,” and he turned around and walked away. We got back into the car, and my parents had a habit of, once I fell asleep, taking me places. I said, “Mommy, I’m going to go to sleep now. Please don’t take me back in there. Those poor souls.” And I just went to sleep.
The next morning, I’m in the living room watching cartoons or whatever with my dad, and my mom’s in the kitchen and I hear her scream, “Kenny!” My father jumps up over the couch, runs in the kitchen, and I could hear them whispering. I’m like, “What’s going on?” I walk into the kitchen and they’re both standing there with the paper, looking down at it, and they both look up at me with their mouths wide open and their eyes so wide. I thought I was in trouble, so I just basically baked out of the room and went back to sit in front of the TV. But it turns out that there was a fire there that night, and a lot of people were killed.
JIM HAROLD: Oh my.
SURANA: I don’t know which fire, I don’t know what happened. I don’t even know where it was in relation to where we were going to be sitting. But there was a fire. Now, my mother doesn’t know that I knew about this, but I had overheard her talking to one of her coworkers about how I didn’t want to go into the theater and that there was a fire that night. She said that she couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to go because I was so excited, but the minute I walked in there, I freaked out and I didn’t want to go and they had to take me home, and it turns out there was a fire in there that night.
JIM HAROLD: Very interesting indeed. Surana, thank you so much for being a part of the Campfire and sharing these stories. I know you have more, so we look forward to hearing from you in the future.
SURANA: Sure, thank you so much. You have a great day, Jim.
JIM HAROLD: Dylan is on the line from Indiana, and he says he has a couple of quick stories. We’ll start off with the one about his dad. Dylan, welcome to the show. I know you’ve been listening for about a year. Newly minted Plus Club member. Thank you for that, and tell us what happened.
DYLAN: Alrighty. This is my dad’s story. This was in the late ’70s on the south side of Indianapolis. He was with a girlfriend at the time, driving. I’m not quite sure where he was driving from – maybe a date or something – but from what he told me, it was basically in the middle of nowhere. So he’s driving along, and he sees this body in the road. He stops, and they’re freaking out, I guess.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, that would be a natural thing. You’re driving down the road and you see a body – yeah, that’s a pretty natural reaction.
DYLAN: Yep. So this guy in this truck pulled up behind him, and my dad was telling him that they were going to go and try to find a payphone to call for an ambulance. The guy in the truck was there with the body and they left to go find a payphone. They drove about two miles down the road, and according to him, before they even got to the payphone, an ambulance flashed right by them going back the other way. They turned around to chase the ambulance to meet up back with the guy in the truck and the body.
When they drove back, there was no sign of the ambulance, no sign of the truck, and no sign of the body. He said this was all within a span of five minutes, and there would’ve been no time at all for the ambulance to check him out.
JIM HAROLD: Wow. So what does he theorize happened? Was it like an alternate reality? What does he think?
DYLAN: He told me that they both just looked at each other and they were like, “Did that really just happen?” [laughs] I don’t really know what he thinks of it. Just kind of unexplained.
JIM HAROLD: That is very weird. That is very weird indeed, Dylan, I’ve got to say. Now, I know you said you had another story as well.
DYLAN: Yeah.t his was maybe a couple of weeks ago. I was just lying in bed asleep – or at least I thought I was asleep – and out of nowhere, I heard this random voice of a female. I could not make out at all what she was saying or what it was trying to say, but I popped out of bed so fast, like a mole at Whack-a-Mole, I’ll tell you what. That freaked me out. I want to rationalize it to where it’s just my brain doing body stuff, but I don’t know. It’s kind of creepy.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, that is. Just out of the blue. You know, Dylan, it is a strange world, and we have these little incidents, and I really think there’s something to them. I really do. I think we’re living in a world that we look at it – I’m sitting here, I’m talking into a mic, I’m looking at a digital mixer, I’m looking at a monitor and things, and yeah, all that stuff is there – although some people would say it’s not there, it’s just some kind of representation of it – but I think there’s so much more than just this table I can knock on right now. There’s so much going on with reality. Maybe your dad had a glimpse of that, and maybe you did too.
DYLAN: Yeah, I think there probably is a lot more going on than what we can notice as humans.
JIM HAROLD: That’s true.
DYLAN: I definitely agree with you. I have one last small, small thing if we have enough time.
JIM HAROLD: Sure.
DYLAN: I thought this was a really, really bizarre occurrence. This was maybe about a couple of weeks ago. I was talking to my mom – I don’t know if you know who Amy Grant is.
JIM HAROLD: Oh yeah, she was well-known as a Christian recording artist and then she went to a general audience, married Vince Gill. I know exactly who she is.
DYLAN: Yeah. Her music used to always be really nostalgic for me growing up because my mom would always play it. I was talking to her about her, and literally like 10 hours later, on a podcast that I listened to, they mentioned Amy Grant. They had never, ever mentioned Amy Grant at all in any other episode that I’d listened to. I thought that was really bizarre.
JIM HAROLD: Yeah, these strange synchronicities in life. They are a real thing, Dylan. They are a real thing. Thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate it, and thanks for being a part of the Campfire – and a Plus Club member, and for all your support.
DYLAN: Thank you so much, Jim.
JIM HAROLD: Thanks so much for tuning in to the Campfire. I certainly appreciate it. And we have a special shoutout today, as we are wont to do.
This one is from Duffy, and Duffy wrote me saying, “Hi, Jim! I’ve been enjoying the show for the last year, ever since my sister highly recommended listening. Her name is Melissa. Please give her a shoutout for me, as she is a huge long-listening fan. Thank you, and stay spooky. Duff.” Well, Duff, glad to do it. Melissa, thank you so much for spreading the word. That’s the way it’s done. We’ve tried advertising and we’ve tried all different ways of spreading the word, but the truth is, the very best way to spread the word is to have you spread the word.
So if you enjoyed today’s Campfire, do what Melissa did and please tell a friend. Even text them a link. It would be most, most appreciated. So Duffy, thank you. Melissa, thank you. And to all of you who listen and have spread the word to your friends and your family, online and off, I appreciate it. It’s really made all of this possible. So if you like what we do, more so than anything we ask you to do, that’s one thing that you can do, and it’s absolutely free. Maybe you’re listening, and if you’re at a safe place to do so, just stop now and text a link to this episode to someone you think might enjoy it. That would be a big help.
We appreciate it. We’ll talk to you next time. Have a great week, everybody, and as always, stay safe and stay spooky! Bye-bye.
You’ve been listening to Jim Harold’s Campfire. Tune in again next time for more stories of ordinary people who have experienced extraordinary things.
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