BRIEF SIGHTINGS

Brief Sightings
Submitted by Alexandra Naughton
Philadelphia - San Francisco

Most people go through life only touching on the other weird, quick sightings that appear and dissolve just as fast. Alexandra, author in San Francisco, shares some of the experiences of her life:


I had just dozed off with an unlit spliff in my hand. The spiff drops from my fingers on to the side of the bed, waking me. I hear two loud and sharp breaths just above my face. The noise is like a large animal. I open my eyes. My cat is right next to me, breathing softly and looking around the room as if she heard the noise, too. I think to myself, maybe I’m possessed. Maybe I need to be exorcised. I text my friend, I want to tell you that something ghostly just happened to me, but if I describe it I’ll get freaked out more. He writes back, Would it make you feel better if I told you I’ve had experiences too? I reply, Not really, lol, I’m home alone. I calm myself down and go to sleep.
 
Creepy, but not that unusual to me. Little spooky things seem to happen all the time. The instance I described above just happened last night, but I quite often find myself feeling like I am not alone, that something is watching me. I don’t know if it because I am extra sensitive, because I am and tend to pick up on people’s emotions all the time when they are trying to hide them and I often feel those emotions, like when someone else is feeling them I can’t help but feel sad or happy or excited with them. I cry for reasons I sometimes cannot explain. I pick up on feelings sometimes when I’m alone and I wonder where they come from. I think I may be what they call empathic but I hesitate to say so for sure because I don’t have that kind of authority. I can only tell you what I’ve experienced.
 
Sitting in Jillian’s kitchen, we’re eating and talking about boys and our glory days or whatever. I look in her living room and see the figure of a woman standing next to Jillian’s couch. She doesn’t move or say anything, she just looks at me. Jillian is facing me and doesn’t have a view of the living room without turning around. Did an old woman used to live in this apartment, I ask her. Yeah, I think before we moved in, there was an old woman living here but she died. Have you ever seen her before? I ask, because I think I just saw her.
 
I’m sixteen years old and laying in bed at my parents house in my old bedroom, the one where I had to move my bed several times because I kept having extremely vivid nightmares when I slept in a particular area of the room. I’m laying in bed and thinking about what I want to wear the next day at school and it’s dark in my room but I like it that way because when there is some light like when the door is left cracked I think about how that is an open invitation to the hallway ghosts to come inside my room and I think about disembodied hands gripping the door and hanging there and the light from the hallway creates shadows and I think I can see things moving around in my bedroom in the semi-darkness, but when the door is closed I can only see my window and the shapes of my furniture. Anyway, I’m laying in bed and trying to feel sleepy when I suddenly feel something in the bed with me. It feels like a body. I am too scared to move so I let it hug me. I feel sad. I am laying in bed with some form I can feel but cannot see and it wants to cuddle with me. I fall asleep with a ghost spooning me.
 
I am rubbing my boyfriend’s back in his studio and we’re watching a John Carpenter movie. I sense something behind me moving and I freeze. I wonder if I’m just on edge because of the movie. I continue rubbing his back and feel like something is creeping up behind me slowly. I slowly stop and turn around and scan the studio for anything moving. My boyfriend has a dog and I notice that the dog is also looking around. My boyfriend wants to know what is wrong and I tell him nothing and continue rubbing his back. Not long after I continue rubbing his back I see a flash of light swoop by me, coming from where my back is turned and trailing off as it comes closer. I get nervous for a minute and look around. I look back behind me and see a flash of something brown duck behind a wall. I feel nervous and agitated and end up sleeping facing the area I kept looking back at.
 
Nothing super profound has ever happened to me in terms of ghostly experiences. They are brief sightings and passing feelings and waves of emotions that ebb away within a moment. I think I may have had sex with a ghost in my sleep once, but I am not certain if that is what actually happened or if I only dreamed that a spirit came into my bed because of sexual frustration in my real life. Similarly, I have had many occurrences of sleep paralysis and the accompanying hallucinations but I do not consider these to be supernatural experiences, even when I am indeed hallucinating “spirits” in the room with me. I feel like I do have ghosts following me around, because I never feel like I am totally alone, but I don’t really mind it, despite the eerie feelings I get at times. Maybe they’re watching over me and protecting me. Maybe I should speak with a medium.

--
Alexandra M. Naughton
http://www.theTsaritsasez.com/

"Alexandra Naughton is a writer in Oakland, California. Her book of poems, I Will Always Be Your Whore, is due out later this year from Punk Hostage Press. Follow her on Twitter @theTsaritsa" 
--
Alexandra M. Naughton
http://www.theTsaritsasez.com/

The Gold is Mine - Part One

The Gold is Mine – Part One
Serial: The House that Never Forgot
Denton Texas: Home of the Happy Hookers 
– So says his Husband Lee

Recorded from Robert Royal – Lansdale PA

Robert owns the local comic book shop, Royal Comics, where we play D&D on Saturdays. He and his husband Lee are good friends, and Robert has always been sensitive to the otherworld. His spirit is childlike, and all children are born with their eyes wide to spirits. He has maintained this gift and has become a good friend. With his bald head, goatee, and round face, he looks more like a hell raiser in a biker gang, but he’s a sweet person, sensitive in this insensitive world. Robert’s stories of his life in the antebellum mansion of Denton Texas would take up a few entries, so I’ve decided to make this a serial. I’ll be telling this dark ghost story in three parts.

As recorded from Robert Royal while sitting with him and Lee, his husband, in Molly’s in Lansdale. I aided with the prose a bit. Part One:

I was a boy. The family looked for the house and found a foreclosed house for 15,000. It needed some work. It was a huge old plantation house—four bedrooms, two half-baths. It also had a little over an acre of property—mostly a grassy field. It had a fenced-in backyard, which was good for the dogs. It had been for a different age—an age of opulence and splendor, of wealthy oil barons. This was a house built of dreams, when old men drilled black oily cash from the ground or herded cattle across grand fields in a time of innocence and plenty.

My mother replaced the front door with a beautiful maple door. She stained and it varnished. It was the most gorgeous piece, the cream-of-the-crop of the house. When you walked in the front door to the immediate left was a twisting staircase with a wooden banister. To the right was a formal living room. Southern splendor. Walking straight ahead was the den, and off the den and in conjunction was the kitchen. Once in the den, there were two sliding glass doors that overlooked the backyard with three prominent trees: an old men oak and two younger brother maples.

To the left of that was a half bathroom and across from that was a garage. From the stairs, going up and if you stand on the landing, you could look out onto the front yard. The first door to right was my sister’s shared room: Sharon and Darlene. The door next to those was the door to the master bedroom. It was at least twenty-five feet wide with a fireplace, a walk-in closet and a huge window that overlooked the back yard. Along with a dressing area, the bedroom also boasted a separate bathroom. If you made a left and went straight down the hall, the next door would be the bathroom. The second door would be my bedroom. And across the way was my oldest sister’s room.

When we first saw the house, we opened the back door, and it looked like no one had lived there for at least ten years. Dead birds rotted on the floor. My mother was excited about the fireplace, examined it and found a squirrel skeleton; it had been eaten. She turned around to my father and said: “There’s a lot of cleaning to be done.”

It wasn’t long before the first event happened.

We lived at the house for a short time. We had a cat that was pregnant, and she gave birth to six kittens. My parents worked all day, and my oldest sister attended college. That’s when the first weird thing happened. My sisters and I came home to discover all six kittens ripped apart on the lawn, which was strange because they all lived in the house.

We called my mom to say the kittens were killed, and she said she’d come home. We were up in our rooms when we heard the front door open. We assumed Mom had come home, and we came out of our rooms, calling down to the hall to see if she needed help with anything like groceries. She called out to us, saying she was home. We went down the winding staircase to find her, to see if she needed help with groceries. We couldn’t find her, and my sisters and I searched the house. We didn’t find her. That’s when she came home through the front door for the first time. She had only just come home.

This is when we knew we were living in a house that wasn’t normal.

*   *   *

I’ll be featuring Rob’s story over the October, and it is an interesting one. Rob is having some local ghost hunters come to Royal Comics on Wednesday, 23^rd October 2013 at 5PM to answer questions and talk to visitors. I’ll be there collecting ghost stories from guests and talking to them. They’re the Midnight Watchmen, founded by Paranormal Investigator John C. Fowler.

The Midnight Watchmen: www.paranormalwatchers.com

Royal Comics: www.royalcomicsandgaming.com

BABYSITTER'S BLUES

Babysitter’s Blues

City unknown, New Hampshire, USA, 

circa 1992

Submitted by horror editor & author, 

Sydney Leigh

To say I was irresponsible as a teen would be a gross understatement. Doing what was expected of me wasn’t high on my list of priorities, but if I was trusted with something, I took it seriously. Caring for animals and children was a common job for me, and I believe it kept me as grounded as someone with her head in the clouds could have been.

Our neighbors had a teenage daughter they weren’t comfortable leaving alone during a brief summer vacation, and left me in charge while they were gone. I was only a few years older than her, if that--but they left me the keys to their car, a few rules, and figured she’d be better off with some supervision. Not so much.

A few days into it, we fell into a groove and I thought it would be okay to hang out with my then boyfriend for a while before getting to the house. But when I arrived, she was gone. Rule number one was already broken: No leaving the house at night.

I dug through her things for her best friend’s phone number and discovered she was in New Hampshire for the night with no plans to come home. We broke two more rules between us as I drove her parents’ car out of state to get their daughter at an out of state address I had to find by street signs...this was long before iPhone maps guided my way. I stopped at several payphones as I made my way closer and became increasingly desperate to find her after learning she was alone with her friend’s older brother. There didn’t need to be a rule in place for that to know it wasn’t allowed.

I don’t know how I managed to get where I did, but I pulled into the driveway of an old house with no lights on and acres of dark, wooded land surrounding it. I sat in the silence for a while, letting my eyes adjust to the dark and trying to decide what to do.

That’s when I saw it. I stared at it for what felt like an eternity until the image fully formed before my eyes, and was struck with an instant sense of profound unease. A young boy in that what appeared to be 19th century clothing--knickers, suspenders, bib-front shirt, newsboy cap, worn out colonial style shoes--was crouched down by a tree, digging in the dirt with a stick. He was just shy of real...by that I mean that he was cast in a protean blue afterglow, and somewhat illusory in the sense that if my eyes wandered away from him, he became unclear.

He looked up and met my gaze, and it was enough to send me back the way I came with no hesitation whatsoever. I was so rattled that I have no memory of the ride home...only the fear and unquiet I felt in my bones.

To this day, his image haunts me...no pun intended. I could put a pen to paper and draw that little boy like he was sitting before me as we speak. The unearthly portrait of his blue-lit silhouette has not left my mind’s eye.

Upon their return, the parents were of course disturbed by their daughter’s overnight excursion, but were kind and gracious in shifting the blame off of me and onto her for putting me in such an uncomfortable position.

If they only knew.

 

Cellar Door: https://www.facebook.com/beautifulWORDSterribleTALES

Ugly Babies: https://www.facebook.com/UglyBabiesTheAnthology

JWK Fiction: http://www.jwkfiction.com/

A TRIP TO THE WHALEY HOUSE

A TRIP TO THE WHALEY HOUSE
Submitted by Arkanthis Rattus
California 2005 – The Whaley House Museum

Although it’s not the scariest or strangest thing to happen to me, my first trip to the Whaley House museum in San Diego, California was notable not only for my impressions, but a photo I discovered when I got home.

I arrived just as it opened. I was the only one there initially, besides a tour guide who remained downstairs in one of the chairs in the entry hallway. He encouraged me to take photos and to explore as much as I wished. I felt a bit of a heaviness in the courtroom area, where guests first go in. Then I proceeded on through, getting a very definite feeling that I was not alone in the dining room. As I went up the stairs I would have sworn someone was standing there, and took several pics. The bedrooms were interesting, but are closed to entrance by guests with Plexiglass partitions. This makes it easy to see the rooms, but impossible to photograph without getting weird reflections and tricks of light.  So I made my way to the room with the stage.

An orb spotted here--a glimpse of a spirit?

Here I experienced immediate nausea and a terrible headache. This room had a very dark, angry feel to it, unlike the rest of the house. I sat down in one of the chairs, but had to leave. On my way downstairs I again felt that someone was standing on one of the steps. I snapped several pics. Because of my throbbing headache I needed to leave. I passed the guide as he headed upstairs. On my way out I was stricken by the very strong feeling that I should turn back and snap another photo. So I did, focusing on the entry hallway where there are three chairs.

Someone sitting in this chair?

When I arrived home and felt better I studied the photos I had taken. There was nothing much on any of them, except one. On that final pic I saw something odd. Underneath the chair in the hallway where the guide had been sitting was an abnormality. I couldn’t dismiss it as a reflection or light anomaly. I could make out an outline of a form, and noticed that it had substance, appearing both behind and in front of the bottom rungs of the chair. It looks like a cat to me. There may also be a kitten in the seat of the chair, but that is more ambiguous. See what you think…..

EDITOR'S NOTE: 

Orbs are often caught glimpses of spirits on camera, a part of their being that manifests in the light. They can often reveal parts of the body or face if studied close enough. They are common in haunted settings and sensitive to being filmed.

Thank you Arkanthis for these excellent photos!

--Fox

Grandmom Visits Brown Eyes

Grandmom Visits Brown Eyes
As told to me by Brown Eyes, a Waitron where I go to write.
Written as narrated to by T. Fox Dunham (Enjoying Martini Monday at Molly's)
Perkasie, Pennsylvania – 1998 & 2008.

(I have much fun collecting stories in person, people who have never written professionally or even for fun. I sit down at the bar at Molly's, and the word spreads around the place that there's this professional author collecting true ghost stories; eventually, I have a queue of people eager to share and all requesting I use pen names for them. Here's a waitron I interviewed today as she shared a tale of comfort, while we drank martinis. This is the essence of collecting folklore.)

I lived in an apartment in Perkasie at the age of four to fifteen. I was about four when this happened. I shared a bunk bed with my brother, and I slept in the bottom bunk. Naturally, I filled my bed with all sorts of plush and stuffed animals.

My mother had married an Italian national, Raff, and we lived together in the apartment. Raff had an extended family in Italy, and he often spoke of his relatives coming to visit America.

One night, I woke up after midnight from a nightmare, and I could see an old woman plain-as-day lying in the bed next to me: wearing blue flannel pajamas, flowing white hair and a wrinkled face. Instead of being scared, I felt comforted after my nightmare. I assumed she was my step-father’s relative from Italy who must have arrived on a late flight and would share my bed, so I moved over to make room for the kindly old woman to sleep. I fell back to sleep, no longer scared of nightmares with the old woman watching over me.

When I woke up the next morning, she wasn’t in my bed. I got up and asked my mother in the kitchen what had become of her? My mother explained to me that no relative was visiting the family, and she asked me to describe the old woman. I told her about the blue pajamas, wrinkles and hair, and she looked shocked. I had described my own great-grandmother’s appearance when she had died.


I saw my great-grandmother again when I was 14. I had a really bad virus, and I stayed home from school. My brother had a guitar, and I was woken by the sounds of his loud chords, even though he wasn’t home. It was probably a dream. When I woke, I saw my great-grandmother again, wearing the same outfit she had worn when I had previously seen her. This time, a haze floated around her face, so I couldn’t make out her facial features, and she glowed with an angelic aura.

Fox asks: Why do you think she came to visit you?

Brown Eyes: She always came to comfort me, though I’d never met her in life.

Dark Children of the Banana Fields

Malevolent Spirits in the Banana Fields

Submitted by Wilma T. Bañaga 

Philippines - Asia

In 1997, our organization was helping a community-based health NGO to conduct a research on the situation of women in their province. We went to different villages to conduct interviews and focus group discussions for the research. One of the villages we needed to go to was in a municipality north of the provincial capital. It took us about eight hours on a passenger jeepney on rough roads and across rivers to reach the place. We were dead tired by the time we got to the house of our hosts.

I was then with an assistant and a two staff from the health NGO we working with. Hosting us in the village was the family of one of the NGO’s staff. They had a two story house with several rooms on the second floor that are only used when their children and grandchildren are home on vacations. The elderly couple who owns the house have been using the downstairs bedroom since they started having difficulty climbing stairs.

We had an early dinner, thanked our hosts and went to our respective bedrooms – three women in one room and the male staff in another. There was only one bed, which my assistant and I shared while the local staff slept on a mat on the floor.

Tired from the trip, I think fell asleep around 7 pm. Then, sometime during the night I woke up and saw a small child jump from the window to edge of the bed near my feet. Startled, I tried to get up to take a look but I couldn’t move. I tried to speak and scream but no voice was coming out of my mouth. I was confused. I was wondering if I’m dreaming but my mind was fully awake. I kept trying and trying to move my arm and after some time I was able to and I sat up to look around. There was nobody in the room except for the three of us. It was deathly quiet. I looked at my watch and saw that it was a little past midnight. I was having a bad dream, I said to myself and tried to get back to sleep.

As soon as I fell asleep, the dream continued. I saw the child again but I can’t really remember what the dream was about, only that it was a continuation of the previous one. And again, I tried to wake up and move and speak and I couldn’t. Again, I tried and tried to be able to move until I was able to move. My heart was pounding. The room was dark and quiet and I was scared to go back to sleep and find myself in that struggle again, but in no time, I was back asleep and the dream again continued. I couldn’t move again. My mind was fully awake but I was frozen.

It was then that I thought that there might be spirits in the house who are welcoming me or something like that. I told myself that I should do something or I might die in my sleep. Then, I remembered reading somewhere about the Lord’s Prayer being a very powerful banishing spell for evil spirits. I started reciting it in English.
 
Our Father who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come,
thy will be done,  
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us…”

When I got to the last line of the prayer, my mind went completely blank. I couldn’t remember it. I decided to start over from the top but still I couldn’t remember the last line. I decided then to say it in Filipino. Surely, I thought, I will be able to remember it but again, I couldn’t remember the last line. I decided to recite the prayer in Latin. I learned it when I took up Latin in college. Still, I couldn’t remember the last line.

My mind was racing. Oh my god, they are preventing me from completing the prayer, I said to myself. I was so scared. I started saying the prayer again and trying to move my arms. I knew I just had to keep on trying and that I didn’t want to die in my sleep. So, over and over, I recited the prayer in whatever language I knew until finally I was able to say it.

“… And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil. Amen." 

I recited it three times and as soon as I said Amen for the third time, I was able to open my eyes and move my arms. I looked around and everything was as it was earlier. I didn’t want to go back to sleep. It was about 3 am. Still a couple of hours till we needed to get up but I was thinking that I should just stay awake but after a while, I felt sleepy again and as I was drifting off to sleep I heard my colleague who was next to me in bed moaning.

I shook her shoulder slightly to wake her up. I told her she was moaning and asked her if she was okay. She thanked me for waking her up because she said she was having a bad dream and couldn’t move or speak. I told her to recite the Lord’s Prayer three times and if she doesn’t remember some lines, she should just keep on trying until she is able to complete it.

I got up at around 6 am and sat in bed thinking about what happened. My colleague woke up and we started talking about it. She had the same dream about the child and we concluded that the spirit transferred to her after I drove it away.

We didn’t tell anyone else about the incident until we got back to the capital three days later. We told the daughter of the couple who owned the house about what happened. She said that beside their house is a piece of land planted with bananas. It has always been like that since they were children, and ever since, the people in the village have believed that malevolent spirits live there. In fact, she said when she was a kid and they were playing near that area, she just suddenly collapsed according to her playmates but she said couldn’t remember that it ever happened at all. The room where we stayed had a window facing that area and it did look eerie even during the day.

Fox True Ghost Tales - 2013 - Haunting A'New!

Time to get your Fox-Spooky on again for another October . . .

I clawed onto the last few days of summer, unwilling to surrender my sandals, shorts and poles, but time beats us with a hammer. I accept the turn of the seasons, and with the coming of October comes the benefit of tales of ghosts, hauntings and demonic infestations. I get giddy.

So I announce the re-opening of the FOX TRUE GHOST TALE PROJECT. I hope to post at least twenty new true stories, photos and/or art depictions of personal experiences. Check the submissions tab for information. I've given the blog a bit of mortician's facelift, and I'll be adding some new artwork and touches as the week goes by.

I have several new stories to share, and I'll be posting one every few days until we get deep into October country. I'm also planning some cool interviews, and I'll keep you posted. What I need is more stories! So tell your friends and share these links in social media. It seems everyone has been touched by the other side, and my readers want to hear about it. This isn't a zine just for authors. This is for everyone to send me your stories. Think of it as writing a friend an email about your encounter with the paranormal.

The first story goes live tonight! And I'll leave up last year's body for a few days then move it to an archive. I really want to see more photos this year! Also if you've got any events this October you'd like to promote, I'll be setting up a schedule page for things like craft fairs, haunted houses, planned possessions. So let me know!

Time to get that Fox Spooky On!

--T. Fox Dunham
Ghost Stories sent to foxghost@comcast.net