Austin Joanne - Weird ghosts: true tales of the eeriest legends and hair-raising hauntings across America

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Text 2006 Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman

Originally published in 2006 as Weird Hauntings

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ISBN 978-1-4549-3298-7

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To my dad for once being able to do a running flip over thirteen people, and to my mom for possibly being the milkmans child. You are the first and best sources from which my own weirdness springs.

Joanne Austin

One need not be a chamber to be haunted, One need not be a house; The brain has corridors surpassing Material place.

EMILY DICKINSON, HAUNTED

There is a ghostly renaissance happening in the United States. Believing in ghosts is no longer considered out there. Instead, its now hip to see dead people.

All you have to do is look at the explosion of ghosts whispering in the entertainment industry. Movies about hauntings have always had a place in Hollywood, but never so many as now. And television has picked up the haunted ball. The home of the occasional haunting over time, its now flooded with shows, both fictional and reality-based, devoted to ghosts and the people who investigate or communicate with them.

The spirit world has even manifested itself in commercials. One recent ad features a house severely infested with poltergeists. The female homeowner calls in paranormal investigators to get rid of them, and when they suggest that the family leave, she balks. Shes consumed with a lust for her high-end bathroom faucets that the scariest ghost cant conquer.

Added to this spectral media feast are thousands of books, DVDs, and Web sites on the subject. You can even buy everything from haunted dolls to haunted fishing tackle on eBay. Ghost business is booming.

And if you think theres more to that banging sound in your basement than bad plumbing, you should know that membership in paranormal investigation groups is up. Record numbers of people are hunting, photographing, and recording the voices of what might be ghosts. Assistance from one of these groups is just a phone call away.

Fact is, whether or not you believe in ghosts, they are everywhere, if not in spectral form. And that brings us to Weird Ghosts.

To unearth stories from around the country for you, we tapped many of the authors who have written for our best-selling Weird U.S. series. Weve also found some new authors who have hauntingly original perspectives on spirits. All are committed to the task of scaring you, and they do it in various spooky styles. Some authors invite you to witness the ghostly manifestations in their homes, but others escort you to ghosts in different places, like the side of a road, the middle of the woods, a sterile hotel room, a neglected graveyard, or a crowded bar. Ghosts can manifest themselves anywhere.

The stories youll read here differ slightly from those found in the Weird U.S. series. In Weird Ghosts, you will find that most stories are backed up with history and first-person accounts. Youll even find location information for many places, so you can check them out yourself. The stories are, as best we can determine, trueat least to the people who have experienced them.

Our goal is to at least make you jump a little when the doorbell rings, if not completely disturb you to the point of sleeplessness. The stories are a good mix of unrelenting violent tales and quieter psychological scares. Even the most battle-scarred horror fans should find something scary here. So read on, and know that youve been warned.

Joanne Austin

The haunted house stories in this chapter are a mixed bunchsome spine-tingling, some merely curious. But thats the norm when it comes to ghost stories. Even if they dont scare the daylights out of us, they rarely fail to intrigue. Thats because no matter how far-reaching our knowledge of science and technology, we find the pull of the supernatural hard to resist. Our love of the eerie is universal and timeless, with accounts of hauntings appearing in some of the earliest writings known to man, be they from ancient Egypt or Greece or Rome. Even now almost every city or town has at least one house thats spoken of as hauntedthe host to ghosts or a mysterious force.

One reason stories of haunted houses are so alluring is that few are tidily resolved. Was the person really seeing a ghost or only imagining it? Were the noises in the night caused by a restless spirit or do they have a perfectly logical explanation?

The stories recounted in these pages are no different. In one, two youngsters visiting their grandparents in rural Florida get more than they bargained for when they explore a mysterious vacant house nearby. In another, a single father in Missouri moves into a large old house with his three children and ends up having to flee, terrified, into the night. On a different tack, a New Jersey couple comes to accept the spirits who share their home, considering them more of a curiosity than a threat.

As varied as these first-person stories may be, some have a number of surprising similarities. However seriously you take them, youll find the ways people deal with a house full of ghosts (or even one!) as interesting as the ghosts themselves.