Spooky Behavior

Dead Woman’s Crossing

It all started in the summer of 1905.  Katie DeWitt James was ready to start a new life.  She had just filed for a divorce from her then husband and had only 14 months earlier given birth to a new child.  As the day wore on she knew it was going to be an important time for her.  But as the day turned to night, tragedy struck.  When her daughter was taken to the police covered in blood, officers were horrified.  Luckily, they found that the baby was unharmed.  But where had the blood come from?  What started as a murder mystery ended with a ghost story in Custer City, Oklahoma.

The baby was cared for by Katie’s family when it was finally reunited with them.  But it had been several weeks since the family had heard from her.  Her father, Henry called the sheriff fearing something had happened to his daughter.  Days later Katie’s body was discovered in Deer Creek   When her husband James was visited by police, he answered their questions, but later poisoned himself and died.  It seemed the mystery had been solved.

But that wasn’t the final mystery in this case.  A pair of travelers passing through town would later happen upon the area and spot the ghost of a woman standing in the woods holding a baby.  As the travelers looked at the woman they at first took for a stranded motorist, she eventually vanished and removed any doubt from their minds that what they had just witnessed was something paranormal.  Reporting their incident, several locals in the area knowingly informed them that they had become the latest witnesses to the ghost of Katherine DeWitt James’ ghost.

But there were other witnesses as well.  Witnesses passing through the area would report that strange eerie orbs of blue light would pass overhead and dance about in the trees, sometimes accompanied by a field of what the witnesses could only describe as “energy.”

But perhaps the strangest part of the murder mystery is the fact that the witnesses would so commonly spot the ghost of a woman holding a baby.  Was there another baby involved in the area that could have also died?  Or was this simply a projection of Katherine’s thoughts onto the area?  Is it possible there was more than meets the eye here?  If ghosts are actual embodiments of spirits that pass on, then the woman should have appeared by herself without the baby.  Perhaps this is instead simply a photograph burned into the space she was occupying that could show witnesses what happened just prior to her death.

(Source: unexplainable.net)

Australia’s Most Haunted House

The house and grounds of the Monte Cristo Homestead in New South Wales are reported to have several ghostly residents.

• The most dominant ghost according to psychics is Mrs. Crawley herself, which isn’t at all surprising since she was known to rule Monte Cristo with an iron fist. During the first few years she spent a great deal of time in the Drawing Room. However, after Mr. Crawley passed away she spent most of her time in the newly converted Chapel. It is here that she is seen most frequently, dressed in black and carrying a large silver cross. Her ghost has been known to order people out of the Dining Room and her presence is felt when a room suddenly becomes icy cold.
• The apparition of a woman in period dress has been seen walking along this verandah. You could be excused in thinking that she was a guest at the period ball that is held annually at the estate, however when this apparition passes in front of the windows the light shines right through her! The identity of this woman is not known.  Some believe this particular spirit may belong to a maid who fell to her death from the balcony. The blood stained steps below were cleaned and to this day, you can still see the discolouration from the bleach. 
• One of the most disturbing accidents occurred when the Crawley’s baby girl fell from her nanny’s arms and down the stairs. She subsequestly died from her injuries. The distraught maid claimed that the baby had been pushed out of her arms by an unseen force (which of course was never proven). Today, young children become very agitated and unruly near or around the staircase.
• The Coach House/Stables was also the sleeping quarters for a stable boy named Morris, who was one day too ill to rise for work. The boss did not believe the boy was truly sick, and set fire to his bedding. Unfortunately, Morris was too ill to escape and was burnt to death.
• A mentally retarded man named Harold, the son of a housekeeper working at Monte Cristo, was kept locked in shackles in the Caretaker’s Cottage for forty years. He was found curled up at the feet of his mothers dead body, and sent to a home for the insane where he died shortly afterwards.
• The most recent death at Monte Cristo occurred in 1961 when caretaker Jackie Simpson was murdered by a local youth. After watching the movie Psycho several times, the boy made his way up to the grounds of the homestead with a rifle and shot the caretaker dead in his cottage. It is believed that he then scawled the words “DIE JACK HA HA” on the wooden door, a macabre inscription that can still be seen to this day.
• In addition, A woman died giving birth on one of the beds, and Mr. Crawley himself died as a result of blood poisoning from his starched collar in what is now known as the Boys Bedroom. 
•   Footsteps have been heard walking through empty rooms, along the hall and down the stairs which is strange in itself. However, what is even stranger is that the steps sound as though the person is walking on hard wood or lino floors even though the entire house is now carpeted
•  Faces have also been seen peering through second story windows even though there is no balcony or support outside. In the Drawing Room, objects such as vases move around. A tapestry hanging on the wall was often found undamaged on the floor the next day. This strange occurance continued until Reg moved the tapestry to another wall and there is remains today, undisturbed.

(Source: paranormalaustralia.com)

Resurrection Mary

In 1934, sixteen-year-old Mary was a regular at the O’Henry Ballroom, which still stands today (although it is now the Willow-brook). She got into an argument with her boyfriend on the dance floor, and left the ballroom. She was walking home along Archer Avenue, and right about the time she was passing Resurrection Cemetery, a car swerved out of control, and struck and killed her. Her family was heartbroken and had her buried in the cemetery she lost her life in front of, still in her dancing gown and shoes. And that is how this story ends. Until five years later, at least….

It was now 1939, and Jerry Palus was yet another regular at the O’Henry. He spotted a beautiful blonde girl across the room, and asked her to dance. They danced the entire night, with the young lady barely uttering a word. He offered her a ride home when the night was through, and she accepted. When they were passing Resurrection Cemetery, she quickly told him to stop and let her out there, instead of taking her to the address she had given him. She disappeared at the gates.

The next night, Jerry went to the address that was supposed to be her final destination. The woman said there was no girl that lived there, and he was mistaken. He spotted a picture on the mantlepiece of the young lady he had danced with the entire night. The woman explained that she was her daughter, and that she had been dead for five years.

To this day, people see the girl walking along the road. They give her rides, only for her to disappear from the vehicle. Some say they have danced with her, others claim to have even kissed her. On one memorable event, in 1977, somebody even claims to have seen a girl behind the cemetery gate, grasping the bars in what can only be described as a death grip, and screaming in pure terror. The man who witnessed this traveled to a police station. When the authorities arrived, there was no sign of anybody. But the two metal bars she had appeared to be gripping were bent and twisted, with what seemed to be finger marks embedded in them. The bars were removed, and it was determined that such distortion could only be achieved through extreme heat and pressure. They eventually reformed and replaced the bars, but they consistently revert back to the charred and mangled state.

(Source: watchmojo.com)

The Ghosts of St. Augustine Lighthouse

The lighthouse and surrounding buildings have a long history of supposed paranormal activity. Allegedly, visitors and workers have seen moving shadows, heard voices and unexplained sounds, and seen ghostly figures.

Reportedly, the figures of two girls have been spotted on the lighthouse catwalk.  Three young girls did die during the construction of the lighthouse. Two were the daughters of the superintendent of construction of the tower - Hezekiah Pittee.

Since the construction was taking so long, Pittee moved his family down from Maine. They lived in a house on-site. There was also a rail car that went from the light station to the ocean. The workers used this to bring the supplies from the beach to the work site. The children, Pittee had five, used to ride on it for fun. On July 10, 1873, while playing on the rail car, five children fell into the water. Workers were able to save two, a boy and a girl. Two of Pittee’s daughters, Mary (15) and Eliza (13), and a young black girl, either a servant or the daughter of a worker, drowned.

Other reports are of a woman seen on the lighthouse stairway or walking in the yard outside the buildings.  Some believe this is the wife of Head Keeper Rantia who died here on Sept. 21, 1894 under unknown circumstances.

Also spotted is the figure of a man who roams the basement. The male figure is said to possibly be that of Civil War hero and former lighthouse keeper William A. Harn who died of tuberculosis on April 1, 1889 .

Melbourne’s Princess Theatre 

On the evening of 3 March 1888, the baritone Frederick Baker, known as “Federici”, was performing the role of Mephistopheles in Gounod’s opera Faust. This production ended with Mephistopheles sinking dramatically through a trapdoor returning to the fires of hell with his prize, the unfortunate Dr Faustus. The audience was spellbound. As the audience held its collective breath as Federici was lowered down through the stage into this basement, he had a heart attack and died immediately.

They laid him on the floor, lifeless, in his crimson vestments. He never came back onstage, never took the bows.

When the company was gathered together to be told that Federici had died, they asked, “When?”. Being told of what had happened at the end of the opera, they said, “He’s just been onstage and taken the bows with us.”

Since then, many people who have never heard of the Federici story have claimed to see a ghostly figure in evening dress at the theatre. For many years, the third-row seat in the dress circle was kept vacant in his honour.  His appearance in the dress circle during rehearsals for a new show is considered a good omen.

Photo taken in 1908

(Source: wikipedia.com)

(Source: Flickr / magdalengreen)

(Source: nightmareonchatstreet.com)

klavieratrek:

Photo taken a few months after the Lutz family fled the famous Amityville house. There were no children in the house at the time this picture was taken.

 The expansive story of the Hodgson family began on a late August night in 1977. Peggy Hodgson, a single mother of four,  claimed to witness what would be the first of many strange and seemingly unexplainable occurrences. Occurences that seemed to center around her two oldest daughters, and more specifically her middle child, Janet Hodgson.  What Peggy later told investigators, is that she witnessed a chest of drawers in the girls’ small bedroom slide, on its own accord, across the room and come to a stop in front of the pair of girls. 

After moving the dresser back to its original position, Mrs. Hodgson was shocked when yet again, the chest slid across the room. Only this time, due to the force of some invisible weight, she was unable to move it. This incident was then accompanied by a disembodied knocking sound that would continue nearly the length of the entire fourteen months.

Two journalists fro m:The Daily Mirror” are dispatched to the house.  They witness, but are unable to capture any tangible evidence of small objects floating in mid-air and being thrown around the living room.

Shortly after the floating object incident, the Society for Paranormal Research, or SPR, are contacted and two members by the name of Morris Grosse and Guy Lion Playfair are first to jump at the opportunity to investigate. After a short time of investigating in the home, both men are convinced that something genuinely paranormal is taking place. Loud noises of knocking, banging, and scratching in addition to the erratic movement of furniture, the major activity presented in the case, continue to escalate. SPR come to the conclusion that they are dealing with a particular kind of entity, one that they believe either manifests or feeds off of psychokinetic energy: a poltergeist.

One of the more shocking accounts, as retold by Grosse, details the destruction of the girls’ 300-pound fireplace in October of 1977.  He explains having heard a loud banging, followed by the feeling of shaking. By the time he reached the girls’ bedroom, the fireplace had wrenched itself out of the wall, ripping a solid metal pipe in half. The only two witnesses present at the time were Margaret and Janet Hodgson, who claimed to have been sleeping.

London University is contacted and a student of experimental physics is sent to the house to test the girls’ ability to influence metal. Within a short period of time Janet managed to bend a spoon completely in half without ever coming into contact with the object itself. The investigators now believed most of the activity to be centered around Janet, who appears to be less and less frightened of the strange events as they continue to occur. 

In late November, three months into the investigation, the now familiar disembodied knocking became persistent to the point of being categorized as intelligent. Grosse attempts to communicate with it, asking it to answer questions by rapping once or twice on the wall. The response that follows is a succession of 53 distinct knocks, all recorded on nearby tape recorder. It is around this time that Janet begins to fall into what Grosse describes as a trance-like state. She is said to have developed phenomenal strength while acting out violently towards herself and others. In order to prevent injuries, Janet is restrained.

On November 26^th a doctor visits the house and injects Janet with 10 mg of Valium, sedating her. Half an hour later she’s found in her bedroom, on top of a dresser, kneeling on a wide clock radio with her head hanging towards the ground, legs in the air.

Graham Morris, photographer for The Daily Mirror, sets up a remote control camera in the girls’ bedroom that can be activated from anywhere in the house. Once activated, the camera would proceed to take a photograph every 4 seconds. He captures what appears to be a series of photographs of Janet being forcefully pulled out of her bed and thrown across the room to the foot of her sister’s bed.

In an even more controversial turn of events, Janet then begins to speak in a deep voice, like that of a man. Grosse begins asking Janet a series of questions, all of which are answered by “the voice”. Doubting that the voice is anything but a clever ventriloquism act, Janet’s mouth is filled with water and taped over. Grosse challenges the voice to continue. It does.

During an interview done by both investigators, the voice refers to itself as a man by the name of Bill, a previous resident of the home who had died of a hemorrhage in a chair on the first floor. Months later, Grosse is contacted by a man by the name of Terry Wilkins. Terry’s father had lived in the Hodgson’s home prior to the family, and had died of a hemorrhage in his favorite chair on the first floor. His name was Bill.

In July 1978, Janet is admitted to Maudsly Hospital for extensive psychiatric testing. Two months later she is given a clean bill of heath and returns home to a seemingly quiet house. Almost as quickly as they had begun, the strange happenings of the Hodgson home had finally ceased.

ghostsinside:

House of Blue Lights | Indianapolis, Indiana.

Since torn down, the “House of Blue Lights” was originally built  in the early 1900s by Skiles Edward Test, a wealthy Indianapolis real estate tycoon. At this time, he owned much of the land that now makes up northeast Indianapolis. In addition to being extremely wealthy, he was also known for being a bit of an eccentric. As such, a number of rumors concerning him floated around. While many were undoubtedly false, he did do some rather odd things. One year, in the late 1940s, Test hung some blue Christmas lights all along the house and in the surrounding trees. He enjoyed them so much he decided to leave them up permanently and turned them on each night for decades. Thus the house’s infamous nickname.

Test also had a three story guest cottage with an elevator and a two story bath house, complete with a diving board attached to the top level of the building. The diving board hung over an olympic size solar heated swimming pool. He was a noted animal lover and owned dozens of cats. Rumor has it that he once owned 150 cats at a time.

There was also a series of tunnels running from the house to various locations on the property. One such tunnel led to the cellar of his mansion. Another tunnel connected the mansion’s cellar to the detatched garage and care taker’s house about 200 yards away. 

Some of the legends of the house included his wife being buried in a glass coffin and interred beneath the swimming pool. The legend goes that when his wife died, he placed her in the glass coffin and kept her in his living room, surrounded by, yes, blue Christmas lights. After a period of time, he buried her in the back yard and installed the pool over her grave. This particular legend, however, proved to be false. 

One other legend is that a curse supposedly hung over the property. If you trespassed, Test’s spirit would haunt you until the day you died. Another legend describes the frequent appearance of blue Christmas lights in the windows of the mansion, even long after it has been abandoned.