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Past Life, and Death

https://ghoststorygirl.home.blog/2019/04/25/past-life-and-death

When I was five years old, I started having a recurring dream. I had this dream often until in the sixth grade I finally wrote it down and submitted it as a school project. I remember waking up terrified, crying, and not understanding what it was that I was seeing. At five years old, I don’t know if any child could. This is not a ghost story, it’s my recollection of a past life.

The dream always began the same way:

A man and a woman are lying on the floor under a fur blanket. There is a fire roaring in the hearth, and I somehow know that the couple are happy. As I look around the room I see that the walls are made of logs and there isn’t much furniture or décor. The kitchen area doesn’t look like my kitchen; it’s just a counter and shelves with a bucket for a sink. There are no appliances or light fixtures, and only one window beside the small wooden door opposite the hearth.

After a short time, the man and woman seem to fall asleep where they lay. I watch them sleep for awhile before the man suddenly sits up looking alarmed. The woman stirs beside him and opens her eyes. She reaches out a hand to touch his arm and he turns to her, telling her that he heard a sound outside.  She listens quietly for a moment and shakes her head, she can’t hear anything unusual.

The man shifts the fur blanket and stands up, walking toward the small dining table and chairs where his pants and overcoat were hung to dry. He moves across the room to the only door where he removes a rifle from a bracket on the wall. He tells the woman not to worry, to go back to sleep, that he will only be a few minutes. He thinks it’s a bear that has been coming around, attracted to the scent of their food. The woman nods and rolls over toward the fire, snuggling back into the blanket.

He opens the door and steps out into a snow-covered clearing surrounded by tall evergreens. I see a tree stump with an axe protruding from the top at an angle, next to a stack of firewood. There are footpaths that have been worn into the snow leading toward the forest and around the little cabin. Now that I am outside, I can see that that is what it is, a one room log cabin. I look up and see smoke billowing from the stone chimney on the other side of the building.

The man pulls something on his rifle and I hear a metallic click. He stands silently, listening for the bear. All I can hear is the silence of a forest in mid-winter. He chooses the footpath that leads around the cabin first and makes his way to the back of the little building. It’s darker back here, but the moon is bright and there are more stars in the sky than I knew existed.

He stops at a couple of spots along the path, listening for any movement before moving forward. When he reaches the front of the cabin he glances back at the front door, but after a brief pause he turns back to the path that leads into the forest and follows it into the darkness of the trees.

I’m not following him anymore.

I’m back inside the cabin where the woman is still asleep in front of the fire, but something is different. There is smoke on the inside of the cabin now, and I don’t like it. The smoke is gathering around the woman, but she isn’t moving, she hasn’t been woken up by the smell. A spark spits from the fireplace and lands on her fur blanket where I can see a small flame beginning through the cloud of smoke. Within moments, it’s a blaze.

I’m suddenly back with the man, in the forest. I’m crying, watching him, trying to get his attention, but he doesn’t know I’m there. He has walked much farther into the trees than he normally would have because he thinks he’s heard the bear again and wants to shoot it so that it will stop coming to their cabin. He walks and he walks, but then he raises his head and sniffs the air.

He turns on his heel and starts to run back up the path toward the cabin. He is afraid. By the time he bursts into the clearing he can see smoke flowing out of small cracks between the logs and around the window and door. He does not slow down, he keeps running until he is at the door, and he pushes it open with his shoulder. Smoke billows out and he throws his arm up in front of his face, but he pushes in anyway and disappears.

A moment later he rushes back outside, carrying the woman. She is in a long white night dress, and she is still asleep. A flame is rising from her hair, and there are a few on his overcoat. He drops her into the snow and rubs her hair in it to put the fire out, then removes his coat and throws it down, too. He kneels beside the woman and pats her face, calling her name. Elizabeth! Wake up Elizabeth! She does not move.

He lowers his ear to her face, listening, and begins to cry. I am crying, too. He feels so sad that she will not wake up. I want her to wake up. He pulls his coat out of the snow and drapes it across her body, trying to warm her up. He pulls her head into his lap and keeps calling her name, telling her to wake up, and then he cries harder. She won’t even open her eyes. He raises his face to the sky and screams, but a loud cracking sound from inside the cabin startles him and he looks back toward his home.

I can see flames inside now, not just smoke. He releases the woman, leaving her under his coat in the snow, and runs inside. He comes back out with the sink bucket and scoops up snow, then runs inside and tosses it on the flames. He comes back out for more and repeats this until I can’t see flames anymore and the air smells like smoke and wet wood. The smoke begins to thin out.

He comes out the front door panting and drops the bucket in the snow, then drops to his knees. He is still crying. He looks to where he left the woman and crawls through the snow toward her. She is still asleep. When he reaches her, he sits her up in his lap and hugs her, rocking her back and forth just like my mom does when I hurt myself. I watch for her to open her eyes; he is trying to make her better. She doesn’t open her eyes.

He brushes dark smudges off her face and smooths her hair out while he rocks her, while he cries. He gets tired, too, and lays down with her in the snow. I am relieved that they can rest together again, but I’m still crying and scared, too. I don’t understand what is going on, but the fire is out and he is not screaming anymore.

I’m suddenly at the back of the house and the snow is gone. The earth smells like spring has arrived and plants are growing back. It’s daytime, and the sun is shining directly overhead. The man is there, by himself, and he is planting flowers. They are purple and yellow like the ones that pop up in the forest near my favourite. He must have dug up these flowers to bring back to his house, because I can’t see any more of them around us.

He carefully puts the flowers in little holes that he is making in the dirt in front of a big stone that wasn’t there in the winter. I drift closer and see a word carved into the stone. Elizabeth.

My ears start to ring really loudly, and I feel like I am being sucked up into the sky.

At this point I always woke up crying. In the beginning, I’d cry until my mom came to calm me down, but over the years I learned to remember that it was just a dream. It never changed, I never saw any more or less details than I’ve reported here, and the dreams didn’t stop until I wrote them down. That was my mom’s advice. Write it down so your brain doesn’t need to remember it for you anymore.

I’ve had quite a few recurring dreams, most of them scary like this one. After the second or third time, I write them down and they stop.

My name was Elizabeth, and I died in a fire while my husband was out trying to protect us from a bear. He loved me deeply and mourned me for a long time. I died in my sleep, I never felt a thing.

 Note: my younger sister is named Elizabeth. For awhile I thought I was dreaming about her and was terrified that something was going to happen to her. It was years before I realized that this dream was about me and that the names were just a coincidence.

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On a Dark, Dark Night

Anyone who grew up in the Hamilton, ON area will be familiar with The Hermitage Ruins in Ancaster. It’s a conservation area located on Sulphur Springs Road, and is home to the locally famous ruins of the Leith family home. Everyone knows that the grounds around the ruins are haunted, that’s not even up for debate. My story is not about the ghosts that everyone already knows about. My story is about the other ones.

When I was 16, one of my best friends was a guy with a car and a great sense of humour. We were part of a tight group of kids that hung out socially every weekend. At 16, the boys were also intent on scaring the girls whenever they could.

One dark October evening, he and the boys decided that it was time to show me around the back roads of Ancaster, a smaller town just west of Hamilton. Ancaster has a lot of history, with old stone buildings still lining the main street today. When we were in high school, it was also where the rich folk lived. There were a few established neighbourhoods, but the biggest houses were located on those back-country roads nestled in trees for privacy.

He picked me up first because I’d earned permanent “shotgun” status, and then we drove around loading the back seat with our friends. I didn’t know where we were going that night until we pulled onto the main street of Ancaster and I finally asked. The guys all laughed, shooting knowing looks at one another.

“Just going for a drive,” my friend said.

I rolled my eyes and suddenly slid across my seat into the door as he cranked the wheel hard and pulled onto a side street. He was famous for applying WD40 to his seats to make us slide while he drove. I reached up and grabbed the handle above the door, our speed increasing the farther into the dark he drove. The boys in the back seat were whooping and laughing, encouraging him to go faster. I tried to be cool, laugh along with them, but I’m sure my face was pale and I was bracing myself against the back of my seat to keep from sliding right out of it.

With one more hard turn, we were on old Sulphur Springs Road. I’d never been there and had no idea what to expect. Clearly though, tonight’s game was “drive like a maniac in dark back roads to scare Kate”.

Sulphur Springs Road is very narrow, winding between forests on either side. Through the trees I could see lights from the beautiful big houses I’d heard about flashing by. There were very few street lights at that time, which meant that all I could see ahead of us was within the span of the headlights. The road was wet from recent rain, littered with dead leaves and lined with a natural ditch on either side. Every now and then the trees broke to reveal a driveway, but we were passing them so quickly I couldn’t see anything else.

I’m sure that if I was a passenger with a driver who was speeding so recklessly on such a dangerous road at this age, I’d have demanded to be let out. When I was 16, though, it was thrilling. I truly did trust my friends.

I turned around to respond to something one of the guys had said as we rounded another corner at breakneck speed and found all 3 of them looking out the back window, puzzled. I frowned and tried to see what they were looking at, but the red tail lights had long past whatever it was that they’d seen. I turned around to look forward and one of the guys yelled “There’s another one!”. He was pointing out the side window and then looking out the back window again. “Did you see it?”, he asked the rest of the group? Everyone in the back seat had.

My friend slowed down, listening to the guys in the back seat talking over one another while they tried to describe what they’d seen. It was me that saw the next one.

“Was that a…cross?”, I asked out loud to anyone listening.  I’d seen a small, white cross sticking up out of the ditch on my side of the road. We’d passed it, but my friend finally stopped the car. We all got out and walked back to approximately where I’d seen the cross, but there was nothing there. Thinking that maybe I’d misjudged the distance, we kept walking. After 10 minutes or so, we realized that we had most likely walked back to a point in the road that we’d travelled before the guys in the backseat had seen anything. They described what they’d seen as small white crosses sticking out of the ditch, too.

Deciding that we were just seeing things through our adrenaline rush, we turned back for the car.

“Holy crap!” my friend yelled, pointing at the same cross the guys had seen. It seemed to be illuminated, although there were no street lights in this stretch of the road and we hadn’t seen another car on Sulphur Springs yet.

We all stopped in our tracks. How had we missed it only a moment before? We edged over to the cross, and my friend touched it. It was real, white painted wood. He pulled his hand back like he’d been shocked and shoved it in his pocket. “It’s real.”, he confirmed. We didn’t know what to say to each other. We just continued to walk back toward the car. A couple of minutes later we saw another one, glowing just like the first had. We gave it a wide berth and walked a little faster along the road.

I noticed at that point just how dark it was. With no street lights and a canopy of very old trees connecting over our heads, there wasn’t even moonlight to help us see where we were going. If another car came zipping along right now, they might not see us until it was too late. I broke into a run, giving the third cross no more than a passing glance as I bolted for the car door.

“Wait! Look!” my friend called out. I stood with my fingers on the handle and turned to see what he was talking about. The glowing cross that I’d just passed was gone. I walked back to where they stood, slowly, covered in goosebumps. My stomach suddenly didn’t feel well, and I wanted to go home.

Three of the guys had walked back up the road, away from the car, past where the cross had been, and turned around.

“It’s right there!” one of them yelled, pointing at what they claimed was a glowing white cross. From our vantage point, there was no cross. My friend walked toward the others, slowly approaching the spot that they were pointing at. He could see no cross. He was 5 feet away from them and could see no cross. He turned around and walked backwards to where they stood, and gasped.  There it was. He tried to wave me over, but I spun on one heel and ran to the car again where I slid into my seat and locked the door.

The rest of the group finally came back and got into the car talking excitedly over one another again.

“Can we go home?” I quietly asked as my friend started the engine. He said yes, as soon as he found a driveway to turn around in.

We continued down Sulphur Springs Road doing well below the speed limit, searching for a safe spot to turn into. We’d passed at least a dozen more crosses, all of them leaning haphazardly out of the ditch when suddenly a pair of bright headlights glared through the back window and a heavy engine revved. There was no way we could have not noticed a big pick up truck approaching us from behind. Those headlights would have illuminated the interior of our car long before the truck was riding on our bumper. And there was nowhere that it could have suddenly come from; we had been searching both sides of the road for a driveway for at least 2 kilometers at that point.

My friend stomped on the accelerator, trying to put some distance between us and the truck. The truck sped up, as well, and stayed on our bumper. If we hadn’t been scared before, we certainly were now. We were in the middle of nowhere, in the dark, and no one had cell phones in those days.

The truck stayed with us for several more kilometers before my friend spotted a break in the trees on the left and pulled hard on the steering wheel. The truck pulled in behind us. I burst into tears, shaking, feeling like I was going to vomit. The guys were all shaken, eyes wide, trying to figure out what to do. We were trapped in someone’s driveway with a crazy person in a truck behind us!

A few minutes passed, and no one had moved. Not us, not the driver of that truck. My friend finally had enough of whoever it was screwing with us and opened his door to get out of the car. We all told him that we didn’t think it was a good idea, but he just slammed the door and headed for the truck.

We turned around to watch and saw the face of an old man in a brown baseball cap behind a dirty windshield. The truck was an older model, painted light brown and white with hints of rust along the edge of the hood. The man sat perfectly still, facing forward, ignoring our approaching friend. There was something very wrong with the expression on his face, or the lack of expression I should say. It was like he was not there, like his body was vacant. Like he was…dead. I rolled down my window and called out my friend’s name, asking him to wait, to stop. He did pause at the sound of my voice and turned to give me an angry look, but he turned back to continue toward the truck.

The truck that wasn’t there anymore. It was gone. Disappeared. My friend stood stalk still in the driveway bathed in the red glow of his tail lights. The guys in the backseat were gaping; they’d watched the whole thing. The driver had not backed his truck out of the driveway. It had not sprouted wings and flown away. It had just…evaporated. Slowly, my friend turned around and got back into his car.  It was a few minutes before he turned the key in the ignition, backed slowly onto Sulphur Springs Road, and began the drive home.

We talked, trying to assemble the pieces of what had transpired over the past half hour, while we kept our eyes on the ditch where the crosses were. Except they weren’t there anymore. Just as when we’d walked past them, they seemed to disappear when approached from this direction.  What we did see were driveways, lots of them. Driveways we had all missed while searching for somewhere to turn the car around.

My friend described the truck and the man driving it as being part of the Hamilton Conservation Authority based on the emblem on both the truck’s door and the man’s shirt. He was angry, his mind already suppressing the fact that the truck and driver had evaporated before our eyes.  He thought that the man just enjoyed scaring kids in the dark for fun. One of the guys argued that the HCA’s trucks weren’t that colour anymore. That they hadn’t been that brown and white for at least 20 years in 1989. He would know, his father drove one for a living.

We had no explanation for the white crosses or the man in the truck. We went back a week later with a second car full of kids who wanted to see what we had seen. It wasn’t a far stretch considering the ghost stories about the Hermitage Ruins on that same road. But there were no crosses this time, and no old man in an old truck riding our bumpers. They decided that we’d made the story up, and that was the end of the hunt for white crosses on Sulphur Springs Road.

I honestly don’t know if anyone else ever saw those crosses, but I’ve heard that others have been chased out of the Hermitage parking lot in the middle of the night by the old man in the truck. In every case, the truck rode their bumpers and disappeared after a few minutes.

The guys continued to take us out on adventures designed to scare us right through high school, but they were never able to duplicate the terror that I felt that night. While I don’t recommend speeding through those winding roads in old Ancaster, it’s worth a drive along Sulphur Springs Road one night if you like feeling spooked!

I have many more stories about things that have happened to me at the Hermitage and the forest that surrounds it, but I’ll save that for another day. Until then, keep your eyes peeled when you’re driving along old roads at night. You never know what you might see.

#ghost ghoststory paranormal #ghoststorygirl2019 ghoststory ghost paranormal psychic truestory

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The Ghosts of Fort George

Visiting a historical fort is fun for any history loving person, but it takes on a whole new flavor when you’re psychic. I’ve been to Fort George in Niagara on the Lake a few times now, but it was my first visit that I will always remember with the most clarity.

I used to work with a local tourism company called Haunted Hamilton (now The Ghost Walks). They offered local walking tours and group meetings as well as bus tours. The Fort George tour was the first one that I did with them as their resident psychic.

What did it mean to be the resident psychic for a tourism company? I sat at the front of the bus getting poked and yelled at by random spirits until I stood up with the microphone and asked the passengers to whom the spirits belonged. When we got to our destination, I was permitted to wander the grounds to see what I could pick up, and that information would be shared with the group. It really was a lot of fun! You haven’t really toured an old fort, museum, asylum or empty prison until you’ve done it in complete darkness in the middle of the night with 50 other people.

The Fort George bus trip gave participants a few hours in Niagara on the Lake to explore and shop before the sun went down. After a great walk in and around the beautiful little town and probably one too many glasses of wine (NOTL: the most haunted town in Canada AND the wine capital of Ontario!), we laughed our way along the winding road from town to the fort. The sun was going down behind us, and the fort ahead of us was obscured by the dense trees surrounding it. We were all looking forward to spooking ourselves, so we went around the parking lot and cut through the forest where darkness had already fallen instead.

We met Daniel and the park staff in their Gift Shop/Registration building and waited for the rest of our tour group to drift in from town. I wasn’t the only one who’d enjoyed a few of the local vintages. We were a loud bunch of historical nerds, and we were ready for some ghostly action!

My night vision has always been bad. When I’m driving I see starbursts regardless of changes in my prescription, and I cannot see street signs until I’m right in front of them. At night, the grounds surrounding Fort George aren’t just dark, they are entirely masked. As this was unfamiliar terrain to me, I stuck close to my friends for guidance. We hadn’t even hit the ramp leading up to the entryway when I felt the first rush of goosebumps on my arms.

When I come in contact with unseen energy fields, I have a couple of physical “tells”. Goosebumps that start on my arms or back will quickly traverse my entire body, including my cheeks and the hair on my head. The other tell is a little less pleasant; I call it the “ick factor”. It’s mostly nausea, but if the energy is decidedly negative it blossoms into a mild panic attack.  The goosebumps I felt as we approached the entryway were exciting, but my stomache was fine so I felt no fear.

The questions began immediately after walking through the tall fortress walls. What are you feeling? Can you see anything? Are there any ghosts? Let me tell you something. It’s really hard to focus on seeing into another dimension when a dozen people are talking to you at the same time! I didn’t have anything to report yet, but told them that the place was definitely full of energy, as evidenced by the little hairs that were still standing on end all over me.

I looked out over the field of buildings contained within the fort walls and really could not see much more than I’d been able to outside of the fort. If there were spirits out there, they were waiting for us to come closer to reveal themselves.

The first building we stopped in front of was a long, two story barracks. Our park guide gave us the history of the building, and then took us inside. The lights were all out except for one dim bulb on each of the main support posts. There were glass display cases on the main floor that held relics from the War of 1812 (for my American readers, that’s the one you never learned about in school because we beat your asses and burned down the White House for fun), and original wooden furniture that soldiers had used. Our guide talked about what a typical day would have been like for a soldier during the war, and then took us upstairs.

We settled on the old crates and furniture around him to listen to our first official ghost story of the evening, but my attention was elsewhere.  I don’t remember doing it, but I’m told I stood up and slowly walked away from the group, navigating the dark room like I knew where I was going, and opened a window behind a bunk.

It wasn’t a true window; it was a long narrow slat, about 3 feet by 3 inches, with a wooden shutter that sealed out the light, held closed by a hinge at either end. I was peering out that little slit when I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to find a number of people standing behind me staring.

“How did you do that?”, they asked, “How did you know?”

I blinked a few times, unsure of what they were referring to, then saw someone trying to open the shutter beside the one I was looking out of. Apparently I’d silently left the group, gone to the far end of the bunkhouse, stopped at the second to last bunk, turned toward the wall, reached up and simply unhinged the window as if I’d done it a hundred times before.  I turned to look at the bunk and a young man was sitting on the lower bed, obviously desolate. I frowned and moved to ask him if he was ok. He met my eyes, and faded away.

I don’t know who I’d thought he was, but I jumped in surprise when he disappeared.  No one else saw him, but they certainly saw me reacting to him. Within moments everyone was standing around the bunk that I was holding onto trying to get pictures of the young man I’d seen.

More questions came that I could not answer. The group spent a few more minutes investigating the bunk and window before being called to move along for the next stop on the tour. I stayed behind.

I went back to the window and looked out over the quad, but this time it looked different. It was still nighttime, but there were people down there. Soldiers in uniform, women in long skirts and bonnets bustling around, and lights and music coming from a building in the centre of the grounds. A cool breeze rushed up my back, and the sad young man was suddenly beside me, watching with me. He heaved a heavy sigh, dropped his chin, reached out to clasp the hinges closed, and turned back to his bunk where he disappeared once more.

Standing completely still, I realized I’d been holding my breath and let it out in a whoosh of wine-soaked breath. I looked back at the window; it was still open. Of course it was. I quickly shuttered it and ran down the stairs to catch up with my group before they noticed that I was missing.

We went through several more buildings listening to the history of each one and a few more ghost stories, snapping pictures and jumping at odd sounds. At the back of the grounds there is a look out tower with a tunnel that leads to its spiraling stairs. Putting aside my fear of spiders hanging from the old stone ceiling of the tunnel, I followed the group in. Our guide stood above us on the stairs holding a lantern, telling stories related to the tower. He hadn’t been talking long when at least half of the group yelped and jumped back against the right wall in surprise, myself included. A large invisible mass was rushing past us and out the exit of the tunnel, and I wasn’t the only one to feel it! Cameras flashed in the darkness blinding me, and I stumbled backwards trying to get out. I just needed OUT!

Whatever had run past us had dissipated, and I was alone under the night sky catching my breath for a moment. My head suddenly snapped to my left where I could see the vague outline of a man dressed all in white, standing alone on the rampart in the corner of the fort. A second, shorter figure, also dressed entirely in white drifted up the hill. They seemed to merge into one figure before fading away like a fog.

Other people had joined me by this time, and a few were pointing their cameras in the direction I’d been staring. Wordlessly I ran for the rampart, struggling up the dewy grass until I was standing where I’d just seen those two figures meet. The air was crackling with electricity, my whole body shuddered as I absorbed it and it passed through my nervous system. I kicked off my shoes and stood barefoot in the grass, allowing the build up to discharge into the ground.

An image flashed through my mind so quickly I could barely grasp it before it was gone. A young man in his nightclothes, a young woman in hers, meeting under the stars in this corner of the fort for a stolen kiss before separating and finding their way back to their sleeping quarters. The emotional charge that they created when their lips met still clung to the air as I breathed it in, reliving a snapshot of a moment that had happened 200 years before. A charge so powerful that it seemingly replays itself  on this spot even now.

I left the rampart to rejoin the group, my nerves still tingling. We were led into the small gun powder magazine, the oldest surviving building in the fort. I didn’t feel any spirits in this building, but was curiously drawn to a black and white photo of soldiers sitting around the building, mounted to the wall under plexiglass. After studying it for a moment, I realized there was a man visible at the roof line who seemed to be almost transparent. I asked the guide about him. He winked and nodded. I’d found the image of a man who’d died before that photo was taken. Employees knew about this ghostly image but liked to wait for visitors to find it themselves!

Touring the rest of the grounds with our group, we learned a lot of interesting facts about the War of 1812 and the people who had lived in the fort, defending our country. There were many energetic hotspots where candlesticks were known to move around and boot steps were often heard, but my mind kept going back to that sad young man in the upper floor of the barracks. I wondered who he was, and what was distressing him. He wasn’t just a residual replay like the lovers on the rampart had been. This young man had looked into my eyes.

We exited the officer’s quarters and I turned to look up at the window that I’d stood at and stared out of an hour earlier. It was open. I pulled my friends aside and pointed up at it. They asked if I was sure I’d closed it when I’d left, as I’d been the last person up there after the group had moved on.

“Yes, she did.” A voice behind us said. Our tour guide. His partner had been following the group all night, turning lights off and locking doors after we’d left each building. He’d personally checked that window to make sure I’d latched it properly. It was closed.

I asked the guide if he knew who the young man was, but he shook his head no. That young man had never been reported before, and no one had ever been drawn to wander away and open a window like that, either. This was a new story for his ghost tour nights. He unlocked the building and went upstairs to close the window again, leaving us to head back to the entryway with the rest of the group.

Back on the bus, Daniel asked the group if they had any interesting stories they wanted to share with the group, any activity they’d witnessed inside Fort George. A few people volunteered their experiences, but most were content to just listen. And then one woman near the back of the bus raised her hand timidly, saying that she might have something to share. She was unsure of herself, clearly struggling with telling us about her experience. Daniel encouraged her to tell her story whether she believed it herself or not. What was the harm?

She spoke quietly, nervously, but her words stopped my heart. She’d been exiting the tunnel under the lookout tower near the back of the group, and had been momentarily paralyzed while, as she described, a small woman dressed in white nightclothes quickly tip-toed right through her. She’d come from the direction of the rampart that she could see me standing on, and hurriedly continued around the back side of the magazine where she disappeared into the darkness.

This was the young woman I’d felt, the one who had snuck out of bed to steal a kiss from her forbidden love in the back corner of the dark fort. It had to be, the timing was uncanny. She’d rushed down the hill before I got there, and this tour guest had been directly in her path. I stood up at the front of the bus and told the group what I’d experienced. Everyone was silent. I hadn’t told anyone what I’d seen or felt in that spot. The woman in the back of the bus smiled and blushed, no doubt happy to have her experience validated by someone who’d shared it.

The bus pulled out of the lot and Daniel popped a scary movie into the DVD player for anyone who wanted to watch it on the long ride home. My friend and I pulled out a bag of fudge we’d purchased in town and passed it back and forth while we chatted about the day.

Fort George is rich in history and atmosphere, and more than worthy of a day trip. But if you ever get the chance to explore it at night, make sure you check out that upper floor in the barracks. Maybe you can find out who the young man is and how to help him.

#ghost #ghoststory #ghoststorygirl2019 #psychic #paranormal #truestory

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The House in Thunder Bay

Dear reader, if you’ve ever been on a paranormal investigation, you’ll know what an EVP is. (Electronic Voice Phenomenon if you don’t.) I used to carry a micro-cassette recorder with me whenever I went out “hunting”, and then I’d spend hours sifting over the mostly silent recordings, hoping to catch something undeniably ghostly. One night, I did.

I was living in a tiny house in the Port Arthur side of Thunder Bay, not too far from the Cascade River. The house was not particularly interesting except for the amethyst popping up in the gravel in the driveway, but I had a really hard time going into the basement to do laundry. It wasn’t a mystery; the basement was creepy.

A huge old octopus style furnace sat in the centre of the concrete floor, its tentacles stretching out to each of the five rooms above. It was blackened from years of use and covered in cobwebs because I wouldn’t go near it. On the front wall there was a heavy iron door on a pully that opened into an old coal chute that was still stocked. A set of stone steps ran up from the back wall to a creaky wooden slat storm door on rusty hinges. If we’d lasted into the winter in this place, I’m sure the basement would have been filled with snow.

These things all added to the creepy atmosphere in the basement, but they weren’t the source of it. There were two smaller rooms down there that I could never explain. One may have been used for storage at some point, but what we found inside of it suggested otherwise.

It seemed to have been dug out after the house was built. The walls were made of field stone, not cinder block like the rest of the foundation. The door was stuck shut when we moved in, but we pried it open out of curiousity. Inside was one small shelf, and a child sized wooden table with one small chair. I still get goosebumps, remembering the stale whoosh of air that came rushing out of that room as if it had been trapped in there for ages.

But even that was not the source of the uneasy feeling in the basement of that old house in Thunder Bay.

The other room that opened off the main basement had a shorter wooden door with peeling white paint and an old brass knob. The bottom of the door had rotted from moisture, black mold rising along its boards. This door was locked.

While I lived in Thunder Bay I wrote and led ghost walks in both sides of the city. They became popular and it wasn’t long before I became good friends with a couple that came out for every walk. They loved paranormal investigation as much as I did, and they knew the city! One night while we were experimenting with divining rods on top of a natural energy vortex near Boulevard Lake (they just spun in opposite circles, they wouldn’t do anything else in that spot!), we decided to go back to my house and finally check out my basement.

We entered from inside the house, using the rickety stairs that ran down to the basement from my kitchen. I had never been down there in total darkness before. A bit of light came in through the single casement window, but the feeling of dread was amplified by the stillness that the dark seemed to emanate.

My friends were drawn to the old coal chute and wanted to open it for a look inside. The door screeched as it was pulled up along the wall just enough for them to shine a flashlight inside, a deafening sound in the relative silence of the house.  They put one of their recorders inside the chute and let the door fall back into place with a heavy clang of metal against metal. I realized my hands were over my ears when they laughed and came back to where I was standing, just outside of the rotting locked door. They stopped abruptly, smiles morphing into looks of shock.

“What is that?”, my friend whispered, pointing over my shoulder to the cement steps leading up to the backyard exit.

I whirled around to see what looked like the tail end of a curling wisp of fog exiting the now open door at the top of the steps. I ran up and out into the yard, but there was no sign of fog or anything else. My friend was behind me, explaining what she had seen: a large mass of white fog rising out of the cement floor and drifting up to the exit.

Thoroughly shaken but also excited, we returned to the basement examine the spot in the floor that she was talking about and to retrieve their recorder from the coal chute. I asked them who had opened the door at the top of the stairs knowing very well that they hadn’t done it; they’d been in front of me the whole time we’d been down there. I also knew the door hadn’t been opened from the inside of the house because the hook and eye latch that kept it closed was on the outside of the house. I doubted that a neighbor had done it. It was 11pm and the seniors on one side of us had been in bed for hours. The neighbor on the other side of us had died on the same day that we’d moved in. (She was found several days later, but that’s another story)

Shrugging it off, we turned our attention to that small locked door. I’d been telling them about my basement for weeks, and that I’d felt like the bad energy was coming from the locked room. I’d already asked our landlord for the key to it, but she didn’t have one and wasn’t in any hurry to replace the lock.

I put my hand on the knob and jiggled it, demonstrating its locked state for them when they asked if I was sure it was locked.  Of course it was. I’d tried it a few times since moving in. So had the landlord.

Except that it wasn’t.

That old brass knob turned easily in my hand and the door swung open.

My friend pointed his flashlight inside and sucked in his breath.

The floor was hard packed dirt, but the walls were the same cinder block as the rest of the house. It was uneven, rising in lumps in the centre of the room as if a hole had been refilled. As if something had been buried there and the displaced soil had been packed back on top of it. Something that had required a hole approximately 6 feet long and 2 feet wide. Something that had been kept secret behind a rusty old lock on a rotting door. The only thing in that room was a dirty old shovel leaning up against the wall.

None of us would go inside. We couldn’t have, even if we’d wanted to. An invisible wall was pushing us back, away from the room, from that hole.

I had no idea what to think.

A few minutes passed before we spoke. We decided to leave my recorder in the doorway to the mysterious room and go upstairs to sit with a drink. We discussed what could be under the dirt, given the size and shape of the patched hole. None of us had any plausible explanation for how either of the locked doors had opened, or what that fog mass had been. We listened to their recording from inside the coal chute, but all we heard was our own muffled conversation and the distant thumping of our feet when we’d run up the back steps and out into the yard.

We gave my recorder about 15 minutes, and then went back down to retrieve it as a group. No one was willing to go downstairs on their own even with the lights on. My friend bravely reached his arm inside the room to pull the door closed, and we ran back up to the living room.

We listened to several minutes of recorded silence, anxiously waiting to hear something, anything from the other side.  I was about to get up to refill drinks when the recorder turned itself off. I picked it up and turned it over; the tape had not run to its end, and I knew it was only a few minutes into a 15 minute recording. I pressed play again, and it ran for a moment before stopping once more. It did this several times before I decided to rewind it a bit, thinking that maybe the tape was wound too tightly. I backed it up to where it had been playing just as I’d asked my friends if they wanted another drink.

And there it was.

“help meeeeeeeee…”

It was like a long, slow exhalation, a woman’s voice, pleading.

I could feel my blood running cold down my arms, goosebumps rising all over my body.  I rewound it and pressed play again.

“help meeeeeeee…”

It was real. My friends were hearing it, too. We played it back a few more times, and each time the tape stopped itself at same spot. Was there really a spirit trapped in that horrible room in my basement? Had she jammed the tape so that we would rewind it to the point where I’d spoken over her the first time we were listening to it? Was there someone buried in my basement?

So, what does one do when they find an odd, lumpy dirt floor in a locked room in their basement when the only call to alarm is an EVP? I certainly wasn’t going to call the police, they’d think I was crazy!

I settled on asking my landlord if she knew the history of the house the next time I saw her, but I never did see her again. I moved out of that house a few weeks later, hopping on a WestJet plane with my two young children and the clothes on our backs, and headed for my mom’s house back in Hamilton.

The reason I left didn’t have anything to do with the mystery in my basement. Or did it? From the day we’d moved in, the day our next-door neighbor had died, my husband and I fought over everything. Money was tight, promises were broken, and after 2 months of constant battle I couldn’t do it anymore. He packed up the house and followed us back to Hamilton a month later where we reconciled. It was like a massive weight had been removed from our relationship. We stayed together for another 9 years after that crazy summer in Thunder Bay. Was the negativity in that house responsible for our deteriorating relationship?

The tape with that EVP is now long gone, lost in one of my many moves since 2003, but I can still hear her whispering voice asking for help, pleading for it.

I wonder if she’s still in that basement, waiting to be released from the hole that I’m now sure she was buried in.  When I left that house for the last time I checked the rotting door to “her room”, and it had returned to its locked state. It was vibrating with negative energy. If I knew then what I do now, maybe I could have helped her. But I didn’t. It’s a regret I’ll always live with.

I’ll tell you one thing, though. If I ever find myself living in a creepy old house with a mysterious room in the basement again, I’ll invite you over to help me dig up the body.

#ghost #ghoststory #psychic #paranormal #truestory #ghoststorygirl2019

[ghoststorygirl2019-blog]

The Ghost of Spider House

I’ve been investigating houses and businesses for years, and there has never been a shortage of stories to tell. But it wasn’t until I started cleaning houses (like scrub the floors and toilets!) for a living that I realized just how much energy houses hold onto.

Last summer, I was sent into a home on Rymal Road that had been empty for several years to prepare it for listing. From the moment I walked in the front door I was reluctant.

Have you ever entered a place and just thought “NOPE!”, and high-tailed it out of there? That was my instinct, but it was my job and I had to do it.

Dirt and broken bricks were strewn inside the front porch, paint was peeling from the door jambs, and I can’t bare to discuss the number of spiders that were living in the corners. The house was like one out of a terrible thriller.

My team and I entered into the foyer to find wall to wall thick red carpeting covered in a layer of plaster dust and thick cobwebs hanging along every wall. The farther into the house we moved, the heavier the energy became. As an empath, I could hear sobbing ringing from the walls.

We toured the house together, the three of us, deciding who was going to tackle which area. None of us was thrilled about any option! I could not stay in that basement for more than a moment, but the upstairs was even worse. Every single room in this house rang with sadness and despair.

I volunteered to clean the main floor bathroom, a rusting, decaying version of its prior self, mainly because it was the room with the least creepy crawlies in it. I set my bucket down and began to scrub the neglected tub, and a chill went down my arms and up my back. It sat buzzing at the nape of my neck, telling me that this was not residual energy in my presence. Someone was in the room with me.

I closed my eyes and sighed; this kind of thing happens on a regular basis, but I was with a new team and they didn’t know about my…talent? Curse?

I whispered “Who’s there?”, and waited.

A woman began speaking frantically, in a language I didn’t recognize. She was waving her arms around and crying, pleading with me. This is one of the hardest things about trying to help spirits in need: if I can’t communicate with them, how can I help them? This woman obviously wanted my help.

I tried to tell her that I couldn’t understand her, that I didn’t know her language, and she seemed to get it because she stopped talking and started pointing at the mirror above the sink, and then the tub, and then the baseboards. She motioned for me to scrub these areas, and then palmed her hands together in the universal signal for “please”.

I nodded and turned back to my scrubbing, and she disappeared.

It took me a good hour and a half to clean that tiny bathroom. We were only supposed to be doing a cursory clean because the house was most likely going to be demolished by any potential buyer, but I understood that the woman I’d met desperately wanted me to CLEAN it, so I did.

As I was packing up my supplies, I heard a shriek and turned around to find her in the doorway, hands over her mouth, eyes beaming and brimming with tears once more. She hugged me, or I should say “hugged me”, and spoke very quickly and excitedly again, pointing at the newly cleaned fixtures, and especially at the baseboards. She clasped her hands to her chest and sighed, said one more thing to me, and then she was gone. It was like a rushing breeze being sucked out of the room, followed by a feeling of long overdue peace.

It took us a few hours to prepare that house for the estate agent, but after that bathroom was done it didn’t feel quite so heavy. The ringing sobs had stopped.

I knew, although I didn’t speak her language, that the woman had been a previous owner who was distraught by the state of her home. She’d been despairing in that house for who knows how long, wishing for it to appear as it had when she had proudly maintained it. It hurt her so much that her sorrow bled from the walls. All she’d needed was for someone to see her, understand her despair, and take care of her home.

Energy seriously affects our houses, seeping into every nook and cranny. Whether it’s an earth bound spirit like this proud woman was, or residual energy piling up from our daily stress/arguments/unhappiness, EVERY house needs to be cleaned.

Sometimes the negative energy accumulating in the corners is harder to clean out than the cobwebs and dust. Please make sure you are maintaining your home energetically as often as you do physically, and if you don’t know how to do it, ask for help!

A home free of negative energy and/or spirits that need help crossing over is a happy home, even with wall to wall red plush carpeting!

#ghost #ghoststory #psychic #paranormal #truestory #ghoststorygirl2019