I love to hear people’s stories about ghosts, guardians and guides! Every week I will be adding new true accounts here that are not in my book. So please come back for more!
Speaking of Spirits
A beautiful nineteenth-century haunted home.
The Gibbs Farm, just down the road from me.
Story 1
When I was visiting a friend in a nursing home, the hospice nurse who was washing her hair asked where I worked. I told her about my book coming out in January. She was quiet for a moment, then she told me she has brought ghosts home from work.
She said there was a woman she used to bathe in a different nursing home. The woman was close to death but kept hanging on to life. Something was keeping her from letting go.
One day, when the hospice nurse was taking a shower at home, the woman suddenly arrived, crying “Rosario!* Rosario!”
The hospice nurse was more than startled. She felt the message was important, so she contacted the woman’s regular attendant at the nursing home and asked her to relay the woman’s message of “Rosario!” to her family. The attendant did not do as she requested.
However, the nurse learned later that a priest had visited the woman. He thought that she needed a rosary, so he gave her one. She died that very day. Apparently, she needed to be clutching a rosary before she felt ready to move on.
After she passed, her attendant finally told the family about the message the hospice nurse had asked her to pass on to them. They found it very comforting.
*”Rosario” is Spanish for “rosary”
Story 2
While C. was at a restaurant, a hot sauce bottle suddenly slid about six inches across the table and toppled over. The group thought one of them must have accidentally bumped into it.
They put the bottle back where it had started. The bottle proceeded to slip across the table and fall over again.
Surprised, they checked the table for moisture because sometimes objects will move across a wet surface. But the table was completely dry. They checked the stability of the table’s legs and if the top was slanted. Everything appeared normal. The table was flat, dry and seemed perfectly level.
They did notice that the sliding bottle fell over the moment it hit the seam between their table and the next one. However, they could not explain why the bottle kept moving on its own.
It glided across the table four more times before they left.
Perhaps someone was playing with them.
Story 3
The hospice nurse I mentioned in the first story also told me about a regular haunting in her home. She felt it was a parent who was hanging around. Lights would come on by themselves and other minor things would happen.
But the worst thing was every night, in the wee hours, the TV would switch on and wake everyone up. It was extremely annoying.
The nurse finally told their ghost to stop it. She said she knew they were there, and they didn’t need to keep turning on the TV. The activity ended.
Until her sister came to visit. That very day, the TV came on in the middle of the night for the first time in months. The ghostly relative wanted the sister to know they were there, too.
We discussed how ghosts will try to let us know they are around by any means they can. They know we usually can’t see or hear them, so they must make use of electronics and physical objects to get their message across.
Story 4
J. used to work at historic house museums. The Sibley House, possibly the oldest home in Minnesota, was built in 1836 by Henry Sibley, regional manager for the American Fur Company. He cemented his relationship with some of the local Dakota through a relationship with Red Blanket Woman. After she died, he married Sarah Jane Steele, and added on to his stone house to make room for a family.
Only four of the couple’s nine children survived to adulthood, in addition to Sibley’s daughter with Red Blanket Woman.
The children moved on with their lives. But after her death, Sarah did not. Those working at the Sibley house often hear her footsteps in the home when no one else is present.
The “landline” phone, which has been disconnected for years, has been known to call 911. Police have become annoyed by repeated calls to which they must respond, always arriving to find no one there, and nothing amiss.
Workers who unlock the Sibley House in the morning have found the table set with Sarah’s fine China—which had been safely stored in the cabinet when everyone left the night before.
Apparently, Sarah is still very proud of her China and wants to make sure everyone sees it!
Story 5
J. also worked at the Gibbs Farm house built in the 1850s. The ghost there is a mischievous young boy. Willie died due to smoke inhalation after he helped his family put out a prairie fire that threated their farm.
Sometimes when people die very young, they are not ready to leave Earth and will stick around for a while. Willie lets everyone at the Gibbs Farm know that he is still present.
He will do helpful things overnight such as tuck in bed sheets and blankets that were left untucked or put together a large coffee maker that he found unassembled after it was washed and left to dry.
On the other hand, Willie will also take out items that were stored away and hide things that are later found in very odd places.
When museum workers put a new quilt on a bed, they returned the following morning to find that the original antique quilt had been returned to the bed.
Willie will do surprising or even helpful things, but they are playful vs. scary, as you might expect from a spirited little boy.
I love old cemeteries and historic tombstones and have taken hundreds of photos of them. This one is a bit creepy!
Story 6
When L’s grandparents got married in 1919, they sought to buy a farm. They were able to purchase one from a distant relative whose grief over the loss of a child made them want to leave that place.
There was a burial ground on the farm a short distance from the house. It was not uncommon in the nineteenth century for families to bury deceased loved ones on their own land. It was a way to keep them close. Besides, in remote areas, cemeteries were few and far between.
Nobody knew how many bodies were buried on the farm, but there could have been nine or more. The only tombstone that remained was for a man who was born in 1816 and died in 1869. The man’s grandson was also buried onsite; he was born in 1884 and died in 1886, just shy of two years old, due to “cramps in the stomach.”
L’s grandmother said that after they moved in, they experienced loud knocking sounds on the outside of the house. At other times, they would hear the sound of chains being dragged.
Whenever this happened, L’s grandma would have a Mass said for the poor souls in purgatory. That seemed to help, because the sounds would disappear for a while. However, eventually the sounds would return. Another Mass would be said, and things would quiet down again.
It’s possible the ghosts on the land were not sure what to make of the upstart family living in their old farmhouse. However they must have become used to the “new” folks, because they eventually stopped haunting them.
Story 8
A dear friend was seriously il for a long time. I told her that if I passed before her, I would come back and give her a sign that I was all right. I asked if she would come back and give me a sign if she passed before me. She smiled and agreed to that.
On the morning of the day she died, my husband was wrapping Christmas gifts on the dining room table, and I was wrapping them on the living room floor. I heard a thud in the dining room. I asked David what it was. He didn’t know.
I walked over and saw something lying on the rug. It was my little wooden sign that read “Home Sweet Haunted Home.” It always sat on top of a wooden counter by windows on the opposite side of the table from where David was standing. I asked David if he had touched it, and he said no.
The sign had been there for years and had never fallen off before. It has a wide, solid base, so it is stable and not easy to tip over.
I suddenly realized that was the sign from my friend! She had cleverly used a literal “sign” to send one—which appropriately and amusingly mentioned “haunted” when she was in spirit form.
I was thrilled that she had wasted no time in reaching out--on the very morning she had passed. I thanked her profusely. My grieving heart felt lighter.
Story 7
R lived with her boyfriend on a farm in a house that his grandfather had built. His mother had been raised there, and his grandpa had died in the home.
R kept seeing a little gray shape out of the corner of her eye that would come up the basement stairs, race through the kitchen and into the hallway, then disappear. This happened between 7 and 8 pm every evening.
The entity moved like it had four legs, so they named it the “Ghost Cat”. However, no cat had ever lived in the house. So maybe the spirit R saw wasn’t as harmless as the name they gave it.
R eventually told her boyfriend that she intended to leave. She chose to pack her stuff on a day when he was away from the house. His family living next door did not know she was leaving.
As she packed up her possessions, she could hear all kinds of things falling out of the kitchen cabinets loudly onto the floor. The resident ghost was clearly angry she was leaving. R felt that they were mad enough that they might even hurt her.
She didn’t feel safe, so she left abruptly, leaving a lot of her stuff behind. She never went back to retrieve her things.
Story 9
Alyssa lived with her husband and four children in a suburban home. She would regularly see a little ghost girl, who would just stand there watching her with a smile. Alyssa thought she was the only one seeing the apparition. She didn’t say anything to her kids because she didn’t want to frighten them.
One night at dinner, she snickered, and her kids asked why. Alyssa finally revealed that she was reacting to a little ghost girl who was standing there watching them eat. Her kids were shocked. “You can see her?” they said.
She asked her children to describe what they saw. They said the little girl was wearing an old-fashioned dress and a prairie sun bonnet. Exactly what Alyssa observed.
Alyssa said they lived close to the Pond House, where settlers co-existed with the indigenous people of the land. She thought the little girl looked like photos she had seen of people who lived in the Pond House in the mid-1800s.
The ghost still resides in the house with Alyssa’s ex. The kids call her Sophie.
Story 10
JoAnn lived in England as a child. When she was about eight years old, she visited a castle with her family. During the tour, she became separated from her parents and found herself alone in a room.
Suddenly a lady dressed in period clothing stood next to her. JoAnn thought that the woman must be a reenactor. The woman told JoAnn about her child, who she sadly said had passed away.
JoAnn heard her mother calling her. She turned to look at her mom and asked her to wait a minute, because she was talking to a lady. Her mom said, “What lady?”
When JoAnn turned back to the lady, she was gone. There was no place she could have disappeared to in those brief seconds.
Later, Joann saw a wall in the castle that was covered with portraits. One of them was of the lady she had spoken to, who had disappeared.
Story 11
When Matt started teasing his partner a little too much, the resident ghost would respond instantly. A loud knock in the kitchen or porch or a sudden thump in the dining room would shake the house. The spirit let him know in no uncertain terms that no drama was allowed.
Matt said he could feel the entity’s presence. But he also felt that they were not malicious. They were just trying to keep him in line.
When Matt’s sister visited, a different activity occurred. The ghost would keep turning off the lights. They had clearly figured out how to use both visual and audio means to signal their presence or their displeasure. And they were eager to do so!
Story 12
K had a longtime friend who was a Buddhist. One year, he took great delight in giving her a kitschy plastic bell that played snippets of every Christmas song imaginable.
K accepted the cheesy gift with good humor and told her friend that she would play the music every year in his honor. After he passed away from a serious illness, the tacky bell took on some poignancy.
One winter day, K was steaming vegetables in a pan on the stove. She became engrossed in a phone call with her sister in another room and completely forgot about the veggies in the kitchen.
Suddenly she heard the telltale opening notes of the first carol the bell always played. That surprised her.
The switch that turned the music off and on had always been hard to move, and the bell had never turned itself on before.
She went into the kitchen where the bell was hanging to investigate. There K saw the vegetables that she had forgotten. The pan was just moments away from going completely dry, which would have sent smoke pouring out instead of steam.
K felt that her friend on the other side had sounded his bell to grab her attention, saving her from burning her veggies, or worse, starting a kitchen fire.
Story 13
Joe went into the hospital for an operation that was supposed to alleviate distressing symptoms from a chronic illness and make his life better. Instead, he ended up dying while only in his early 40s, leaving behind a wife and two young children.
Jim and Joe were the closest siblings in their large family and were as much best friends as brothers. Although the whole family was devastated by the loss of Joe, it hit Jim especially hard.
Six months after his brother’s death, Jim went outside on a sunny summer Sunday to read the paper on the patio. His dog Jack came with him and sat by his feet.
Suddenly, the dog leapt up and trotted over to the back gate of the fenced yard. The dog looked up as if he saw someone standing there.
Then he turned around and came back toward Jim, all the while looking up and back at the empty air as if he was watching a person walking beside him. He returned to his place near Jim, but his attention was focused on the empty chair across the table.
Jim had a strong feeling that his brother was now sitting in the chair. Joe and the dog had always been pals, and Jack would have responded exactly as he had just done if Joe had entered the yard.
Jim felt Joe had come to find out how he was doing. He started talking to the brother he could not see.
The presence of his loved one was a gift.
Story 14
When Jenny was younger, she lived in a nineteenth century farmhouse with her husband. She learned that the place was haunted in a very disturbing way.
When she was coming down the staircase during her first pregnancy, suddenly everything went dark; she felt as if she had just been blinded. Then she was pushed down the staircase by an unseen force. Fortunately, she was not seriously hurt—just bruised—and her baby was unharmed.
The next time Jenny became pregnant, the same exact thing happened. She was abruptly “blinded” and shoved down the stairs. Once again, she was bruised and in pain, but not seriously injured, and her baby was okay.
Clearly, the resident ghost—or perhaps a darker entity—did not want little ones invading “their” space.
Jenny and her family decided they could not risk further assaults and found a new home.
The mansion where C stayed.
Story 15
C drove to a small town in the country for a weekend work retreat. She and her coworkers met at a mansion built by a lumber baron in the late nineteenth century. The corporate retreat was stressful, but at least C could retire to her own private bedroom at the end of each day.
The first night, C secured her bedroom door and set the alarm on the clock by her bed. She didn’t want to be late for the first session in the morning.
She woke up in the middle of the night. The bedroom door had swung wide open. But no one stood in the doorway. Surprised and confused, C got up and shut the door again. She eventually managed to fall back to sleep.
The next thing she knew, someone was knocking on the door to wake her up. C had overslept. She looked at the bedside clock and saw that the alarm had been turned off. She had been so careful the night before to make sure it was set properly. How could that have happened?
At the end of the weekend, C decided to take a quick look around the historic mansion before leaving. When she glanced into the kitchen, she saw a bulletin board. On it was posted a prominent phone number—for Ghostbusters.
Suddenly what she had experienced in her room made sense. C suspected that she was not the first person to have been visited by ghosts in that old mansion.
Story 16
Karen was on a business trip with coworkers in Canada. When she got back to her hotel room late in the evening, the phone’s message light was on (this was before cell phones). Her mother had called and was very upset, which was rare for her. She wanted Karen to call home right away.
When Karen called, she learned that her father had experienced a stroke. The doctors said it was so serious that she should fly home immediately. They feared he wouldn’t make it.
Karen didn’t know how she could make that happen. There were no flights available. She was so upset and worried that she could not sleep. She prayed all night.
In the morning (Sunday), Karen went to church and prayed some more. Suddenly, she physically felt that a huge angel was standing behind her. He wrapped his wings around her. At that moment, Karen felt total peace. She instantly knew that everything was going to be okay.
When she returned to her hotel room, Karen called her mother, who sounded elated. Her mom said, “It’s a miracle!” That morning Karen’s unconscious and unresponsive father had awakened and started moving around.
It had happened at 9 am—the exact moment Karen had felt the angel wings enfold her.
She no longer needed to rush home.
Story 17
Annette grew up in a large family with eight kids. Their beloved collie Taffy would always do the rounds at bedtime, checking on each one of the kids. She would finish by visiting Annette and her sister, who shared a big bed. Every night she settled in with the two, lying between them.
One day, a huge storm cracked a large branch on a tree outside their home. Their father worried that it might fall and injure someone, so he decided to remove it. Taffy was very excited by this activity and kept running underneath him. Annette’s father told his kids to watch the dog, and they kept pulling her away from the tree.
But suddenly the huge limb fell. As fate would have it, it struck Taffy and seriously injured the dog. The family wrapped her up and tried to comfort her. But she died the next day.
It was Palm Sunday and Annette’s mother had made a big meal. But no one felt like eating, they were so grief-stricken over the loss of Taffy. Annette started feeling ill and ended up staying home from school the next day.
While she was lying home alone, sick in bed, she heard the undeniable sound of her dog’s claws tapping across the linoleum and wood floors, getting closer and closer to her bedroom. The hair rose up on her arms.
The tapping continued all the way to the edge of her bed and then she heard sniffing as if a dog stood there. But she saw nothing. She was afraid the ghost dog would jump up on her bed.
But instead, Taffy left her in peace. She only visited that one time.
Perhaps it was her way of saying goodbye before heading to the other side.
Story 18
Luna and her boyfriend lived in a remote house, and she was often alone because he would be gone for a month or more at a time fighting wildfires.
One day, when Luna was in the shower, bottles suddenly fell off the shelves in the bathroom. Then the shower curtain was ripped down.
She didn’t see anyone. But her dogs were barking like mad. Luna was afraid that she wasn’t alone in the house.
She eventually asked her landlord if anything odd had ever happened in the house. He told her that the previous owner had died in the bathroom.
Right after Luna told her story, a woman she didn’t know named Rose asked if the house was white and she cited the location and the street. It was the very house Luna had lived in!
Rose said she and her mom had looked at that house years before Luna had lived there. They were thinking about renting it. But when Rose went into the bathroom, everything started falling off the shelves and the ceiling-mounted curtain rod smashed to the floor. She said “Nope! We’re not staying here.”
Both had experienced the same poltergeist activity in the bathroom of the same house, many years apart.
The ghost did not want to leave.
But over and over, the renters did.
Story 19
Alice was conversing with a coworker between the stacks of the library where they worked, when she noticed an old man staring at them from the end of the aisle. He was wearing a red and black checked shirt with suspenders and his gaze was unfriendly.
They asked if they could help him, but he did not respond.
Suddenly a book floated horizontally out of one of the shelves into the air right in front of them. Then it fell to the floor. Alice said it was just like the scene in “Poltergeist.”
She picked up the book and returned it to the shelf where it had come from.
Still the old man stared. Silent. Sullen.
A different book floated horizontally out of its place into the air. When it reached the middle of the aisle, it dropped to the floor. Again, Alice picked up the book and put it back where it belonged.
The man continued to stare at them.
The two decided to go around opposite sides of the stacks to converge on the man and try to talk to him. But when they got to where he had been standing, there was no one there.
If he had walked out, they would have spotted him through the open shelving. However, they had seen nothing. He was simply gone.
At least the books stopped floating off their shelves.
The haunted Bullock Hotel in Deadwood, South Dakota
Story 20
Bonnie and her husband chose to stay in a haunted hotel when they visited Deadwood. At the Bullock Hotel, they met a family with a 16-year-old boy who was very excited to hunt for ghosts there. He had brought beginning ghost hunting equipment, including an EMF reader, a recorder and a flashlight.
The boy’s parents and Bonnie’s husband didn’t feel like staying up all night to search for spirits, but Bonnie was willing to join him. At around 2 am, they went to a hallway outside of one of the most reputedly haunted rooms in the hotel.
The teen put his flashlight on the floor, and it suddenly switched to strobe setting, flashing on and off with no one near it. When he turned on his recorder, it picked up some interesting noises, possibly voices, but they were unintelligible.
The boy said, “If there are any spirits here, let your presence be known!” Then he cried “Ow!” Bonnie saw that he now had a razor-thin slice on top of his thumb, like a paper cut, that was bleeding. Neither of them could figure out how that could have happened, since he hadn’t hit his hand against anything. The teen had simply been holding his phone out to record ghosts.
Something odd also happened in Bonnie’s hotel room. She had brought a treasured necklace with her that had come from a dear friend who had passed away. Bonnie had carefully placed it on the dresser in their room.
However, her husband later spotted something on the floor several feet away from the dresser, under the bed. It was her necklace. Neither of them had moved it and no one else had been in the room since Bonnie put the necklace on the dresser.
They couldn’t explain how it had ended up under the bed. But Bonnie was very glad that her husband had seen it!
Story 21
Alice got a new job at a scholarly library. When she was first scheduled to close the building at the end of the day, her boss firmly told her not to stay past 12 minutes after the hour. Alice thought that was oddly precise, but she abided by the rule.
However, one evening when she was there closing, the clock ticked to 14 minutes past the hour.
Suddenly magazines lying on one of the tables started flying off violently.
She noticed the black figure of a man standing in the back of the room.
More magazines flew wildly into the air, drawing her attention for just a second. When she looked back to where the black figure had stood, she saw that he was now closer to her.
A third time, she was startled by crazy new commotion from the magazines. She only looked away for a second, but this time when she returned her gaze to the figure, he was disturbingly close. She did not want to think what might happen if she looked away again—or even blinked.
She got out of there as fast as she could.
Every morning, the librarians had been picking up magazines strewn all over the floor.
Now Alice knew why.
Story 22
Jay was sleeping soundly with his partner when he was awakened by her cat jumping on the bed. The cat started walking around and padding on the blankets with his paws.
The cat wouldn’t settle down and all the commotion was keeping Jay awake, so he tried to push the feline off the bed with his foot. He thought he had succeeded when the activity stopped for a while.
Then Jay felt the cat jump back on the bed. The disturbance started again, with little feet padding around and making biscuits in the blankets. Annoyed, Jay turned over to look at the cat.
There was nothing there.
Shocked, he asked his girlfriend if she had a ghost cat.
“No,” she said. “That’s my dad. He likes to mess with people.”
Men often feel nervous about meeting their girlfriend’s father. But imagine doing so when the guy is a ghost—who sees you in bed with his daughter.