Wilder - Spirits out of time: true family ghost stories and weird paranormal experiences

Annie Wilder is a writer and the mother of grown children. She hosts haunted tea parties at her ghost-filled Victorian house in a historic Mississippi River town in Minnesota. House of Spirits and Whispers , her first book, is a true account of her experiences living with ghosts. Visit her online at www.anniewilder.com.

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

Spirits Out of Time: True Family Ghost Stories and Weird Paranormal Experiences 2009 by Annie Wilder

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First e-book edition 2010

E-book ISBN: 9780738726069

Book design by Rebecca Zins

Cover design by Kevin R. Brown
Cover frame: istockphoto; cuckoo clock: PhotoDisc
Cover photo of Maggie, Dorrie, and Mimi McDonough,
and all interior photos unless otherwise specified, are courtesy of the author

Photo on page 168 by Lynne Menturweck

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Llewellyn Publications

Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

2143 Wooddale Drive

Woodbury, MN 55125

www.llewellyn.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

contents

Yourself and Bless Your Space

This book is dedicated to my dads brother Larry

and my moms sister Margie.

It is also dedicated to my cousin Stephanie (Alexandra).

I wish to thank everyone who contributed a story or photograph or their time to this book. Great-Aunt Clara shared wonderful stories of her grandma Wieland (my great-great-grandma) and was a joy to talk tothanks, Clara, for all the help and the pictures and poem. Great- Aunt Irene graciously gave permission to include her ghost stories and some of her experiences living in the Irish family homestead. My aunt Margie, along with my moms cousins Bev and Kay, and my daughter Molly, helped Irene and me with proofing and filling in details.

My mom, Aunt Margie, and Aunt Kathy were a tremendous help with pictures and stories from the Irish side of the family, and my dad provided detailed and entertaining answers to dozens of email queries about the Montana side of the family. Thanks to my siblings and their spouses/significant others, my nieces and nephews, and my kids Molly and Jack for sharing your stories.

I want to extend special thanks to my friend and fellow writer Jennifer Spees for reading my manuscript and for her excellent suggestions, and to my daughter Molly for helping organize and manage the permissions process. To my beau and partner Levi, thanks for the emotional support, the many hours of proofing and reading, and for all the cooking!

Several psychics and other paranormal or metaphysical professionals granted permission to use their names and stories in my bookthank you Robert Baca, Echo Bodine, Lori Bogren, Linda Drake, James Endredy, Ted Hughes, Jodi Livon, Patrick Mathews, Dave Schrader,
C. J. Sellars, Mary Stoffel, and Mary Ann Winkowski. Thank you to Ivy for letting me use the India ghost photo, and Linda and Jim at the Historic Trempealeau Hotel and Roger at Magus Books for letting me include the names of your business establishments in my story. Cindy Thury Smith at the City of Hastings Pioneer Room spent many hours helping me do research for the ghost book that wasnt ready to be writtenyet. Thank you, Cindy, for all the help and for providing the picture of Katrina Hartnett that appears in this book.

I truly appreciate my moms cousin Margies permission to tell her daughter Stephanies story in the chapter on animal spirits and messengers.

Thanks to my friend Vanessa Wright and everyone at Llewellyn who helped make my book a reality, especially Jeanette Jones for doing a great job with all of the interior photographs, Lynne Menturweck for taking the photograph for the White Deer chapter opener, and Kevin Brown for the extra help with the cover photo of Maggie, Dorrie, and Mimi McDonough. A huge thanks goes out to my editor and friend Becky Zins for lending her talent and creativity to this project.

Finally, Id like to express my deep appreciation to my uncle Larry and aunt Margie, who each gave our family a wonderful and lasting gift: they collected our family stories and wrote them down.

This book is a true recollection and account of ghostly or paranormal phenomena that my family and I have experienced, and it represents, to the best of my ability, accurate retellings of real events. Some of the names in the book have been changed for privacy.

Stories can conquer fear, you know.
They can make the heart bigger.

Ben Okri

I have always been fascinated by secrets. And Ive always been drawn to stories with elements of magic and death and drama. Maybe its my Irish blood, my twelfth-house moon, or the intuitive awareness, even as a child, that there was much, much more going on around us than was acknowledged at school or on TV. As a child, I loved grippingly sad fairy tales Babes in the Wood , The Little Mermaid , and The Little Match Girl were among my favorites, along with the decidedly less grim picture-book adventures of Dorrie, the Little Witch. I love ghost stories, especially true ones, which is part of the reason I have been perfectly happy living in a haunted house for the last fifteen years. I wrote about my experiences living with ghosts in my first book, House of Spirits and Whispers .

This book is a collection of family ghost stories and lore. Some of these stories I only learned about after my first book came out. Other stories Ive heardor heard snippets ofsince I was a child. I figured out early that the best time to hear the most interesting stories was by hanging around the grownups when there werent any other kids aroundat fancy family parties when the after-dinner cordials were served, or in the kitchen while the grownups took turns at washing dishes. Many of the stories come from my moms Irish relatives. My Irish grandma, whom I adored, told us about fairies, or little people, and banshees and Irish beliefs regarding death, like the death knock that would be heard just before someone in the house died. My Irish great-grandmother told my mom stories about the fairies that had come over from Ireland, hidden in the trunks of the people coming to start a new life in America. And my mom, who can see and hear spirits, was followed around for decades by the ghost of a young girl. It was only recently that she learned the spirit girls surprising identity.