Wayland - 50 Real American Ghost Stories

50 Real American Ghost Stories

A journey into the haunted history of the United States 1800 to 1899

Selected and Edited by MJ Wayland

Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea.... We are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.

HENRIK IBSEN, Ghosts

ALSO BY MJ WAYLAND

50 Real Ghost Stories

50 Real Ghost Stories 2

Real Christmas Ghost Stories

The York Ghost Walk

Yorks Hidden Hauntings

The Derby Ghost Walk

Old Lancashire Hauntings

Tales of the Polden Hills

Paperback published 15th October 2013

Copyright 2013 MJ Wayland

978-1-909667-12-9 ePub version

978-1-909667-13-6 Paperback

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Published by Hob Hill Books

www.hobhill.com

Author website

www.mjwayland.com

Dedicated to Louise Jeffrey

My guide to the biggest mystery in life....love

Thank you for being my everything

Introduction

Being a British-born ghost hunter I have focused my attentions on the ghostly appearances within the United Kingdom. For the last twenty years I have explored archives and visited taken part in hundreds of ghost hunts and paranormal investigations yet only a handful have taken place in the United States.

So why write a book about American hauntings? Well the basis of this book begins in 1980 when one Christmas day I received a copy of the Usborne Guide to the Supernatural World. A highly illustrated book dedicated to Vampires, Ghosts and Mysterious Powers that set me on the path of ghost hunting. It was a strange book to a seven year old child. As much as I feared its contents, the more I read, the more I became scared, and the more I had to read on!

However one day in January I reached page 100 and the beginning of the Hauntings in America chapter. The book detailed in a spectacular fashion the Colorado Ghost Lights, the Maryland Ghost Pirate who appeared as a ball of fire and not forgetting The Walsingham Ghosts a haunted house in which Horace Gunn witnessed a human head covered in blood floating over his bed. Well that was it, the book was hidden for a year until I was of more of a non-nervous disposition.

But, it was that fear that changed into curiosity. Here I am, still not able to look at page 104, researching ghost sightings in the United States. After completing Real Christmas Ghost Stories I decided not to write a book but to research some of the stories mentioned in that childhood book and this lead to a five month journey through Americas newspaper and local archives.

Aside from uncovering some of the most strangest ghost stories I have ever read, I have also discovered the following about American Ghosts:

Americas haunted history from a media perspective started in the 1830s, previous stories related to ghosts witnessed in Britain and not stories from the United States.

The Bell Witch This most infamous of ghostly cases from 1804 doesnt even warrant a mention in any newspapers from 1800 to 1890.

Pre-1840s Americans were a highly sceptical bunch, more curious than being believers. The Fox Sisters put paid to that and the ghost phenomenon began to spread across the US and UK. The massive increase in real life reports of ghost activity in the media can be directly correlated with the first reports of activity at the Fox household.

I discovered a few classic ghost stories were created by counterfeiters to discourage local interest in the areas they worked.

By the end of the 19th century most of the United States most famous mediums had been exposed as frauds or at least had several allegations against them. The Bangs sisters, Fox sisters and the Eddy brothers were all exposed to have faked seances and paranormal activity.

The Capitol Building was without doubt the most haunted building in the whole of the US. And probably still is!

I am still researching Americas hauntings and on doing so, I can see the change in the experiences that people were having from the 19th century into the 20th century. It is this change that I want to explore in a second book covering this time.

This first book I want to be a snapshot of the ghostly activity reported during the 1800s but also one that provides an insight into the vast scale of alleged activity. So we have the hoaxes, clairvoyants and very wayout stories but we also gain a keen insight into the big stories of the day. The Robertson family, especially Clara became a local celebrity due to her experiences, the Hoffman family had hundreds (if not thousands) of visitors travelling many miles to visit their haunted house and we have Mumlers Spirit Photographs that became a sensation in Boston and New York. All famous stories that I have brought to the fore.

The book also includes many stories that I have not seen in print before. I have tried to provide an eclectic selection so that the reader understands that a ghost sighting isnt a simple thing, its a complex experience that even nearly two hundred years later we are trying to understand.

Whether you read from beginning to end, or choose a story at a time, delve, explore and enjoy these stories will perplex, confuse and no doubt send a shiver down your back.

MJ Wayland

York, England

Halloween 2013

Faces in the Windows

In 1871 and 1872, people in Ohio and San Francisco reported a number of unusual phenomena attributed to ghosts could mysterious, faint human faces appearing in window panes really be spectral phenomena?

In May 1871, the Chicago Times reported that for months the cities of Milan and Sandusky, Ohio, were the focus of interest because images of human faces had appeared in a number of glass windows in various buildings. All the clippings from the newspaper archives report that the faces looked like an early type of photography known as daguerreotype but slightly imperfect.

On inspecting the affected glass frames, the Chicago Times correspondent wrote,

The first appearance of the glass is a stony steel color , interspersed with a dull ashen color. Or it has some appearance of water that has tar or crude oil mixed with it, and one can see the oily substance floating on the top of the water, giving it a variety of colors.

Does this suggest that it was actually some form of effect created by a hoaxer? The correspondent continued,

When the discoloration of the glass is first noticed, there is no clearly defined outline of a human face, but gradually day by day, in the center of this discolored appearance, a face begins to shape and form, until it requires no stretch of the imagination in order to see the well-defined features of an individual who appears to be looking out of the window from the room within.

Strangely, if you entered the room to look at the face in the window, nothing could be seen. In several cases, the faces appeared on the windows of deserted houses, although there were a few that were occupied.

The plainest picture is that of a middle-aged man, upon the window of an old building in North Milan, across the Huron River. It was built for a hotel, and used for that purpose for a long time, but is falling into decay now, and is used as a dwelling house, and occupied by a Mr . Horner.

Deacon Ashley, a member in good standing in the Presbyterian Church, and a worthy man, keeps a jeweler's store on the south side of the square in Milan. One of these pictures commenced to show itself upon one of the upper windows of his store. The deacon protested, but day by day it continued to develop into the features of a black woman. The deacon called in the services of soap and sand, but that would not eradicate it, and finally, despairing of disposing it in any other way, he took paint and brush and hid it out of sight by painting the glass over, letting it remain so for a number of weeks, and then removing the paint from the glass, when he found that it was still there as plain as ever, and now he has come to the conclusion to let it alone, as he says it is growing plainer every day, so that one can see the ruffles around the border of the woman's cap.