Is a house in Florida haunted by a female ghost?

CASE DETAILS

If you happen to be in Lake Wales, Florida, there’s a house you might want to avoid. It’s a very ordinary looking house, but as you can probably guess, appearances can be deceiving. In the fall of 1991, 19-year old Alan Mann lived in the house with his parents. Alan worked nights, and during the day, he was often home alone—or so he thought:

“I had the afternoon off. I’d come home and I guess it was about 3:00 o’clock in the afternoon, I’d finally gotten some sleep.”

Then, suddenly the image of a mysterious woman appeared before him:

“The figure turned away from the door like it was leaving. And by the time I got up and walked three paces to the door, I don’t know what happened, it just turned the corner and disappeared.”

Alan Mann said he looked high and low for the mysterious woman. But even though the doors were locked from the inside, she was nowhere to be found. He told his mother he thought he’d seen a ghost, but his mother refused to believe him. That was that, until Alan got married, and his 16-year-old bride Linda moved into the house. Shortly after the wedding, Alan’s mother, Sandra, was watching TV with her new daughter-in-law. Sandra, the skeptic, was about to change her tune:

“I had my little dog Prince beside me. And he was on a pillow. And I looked down at the end of the couch and I saw this white smoky thing. And the first thing I thought was fire, and by that time, the dog had gotten up on his feet and then it just disappeared. And when Prince came back I said Prince… we’ve got company.”

Even though Linda hadn’t seen the apparition, she was convinced the house was haunted. Determined to get the scoop, Linda enlisted a friend with a Ouija Board:

“The board talked real good with me. I believed in it. I’ve believed in that kind of stuff for a while. But I never come across it until then.”

According to Linda and Alan, the board spelled out the name “Kramer.” That was all the proof they needed. They had a ghost and her name was Kramer. Alan’s father David, however, wasn’t convinced:

“I thought I was living with a bunch of flakes. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. If it was a paranormal experience or something like that, I didn’t want to have to worry about that, I didn’t want to admit it.”

Linda and Alan, however, knew there was a ghost. But they weren’t prepared for what happened next. According to Alan, Linda suddenly attacked him in their bedroom:

“All of a sudden she just snapped. And she got this weird look. She pretty much attacked me. She was laughing. She had some weird laugh I had never heard. It didn’t even sound like her. She has this squeaky little giggle. And this was, almost an evil laugh.”

Linda had become, seemingly possessed and was holding down Alan. Alan remembers how forceful his wife became:

“I tried to get away and it made her get more violent. And she started putting more force on my arms. So I pushed against her. And I slammed her against the wall three times. And she released me. And she put her head on my shoulder again and started talking and picked up the conversation exactly where she left off before she snapped.”

Even stranger was the fact that Linda had no recollection of the events that took place:

“That’s not me. I don’t have an evil laugh. I don’t do the things that he says I do, that’s just not my type. I’m not that type of person. I just don’t remember.”

Suddenly, the harmless ghost had taken on a whole new personality that was difficult to ignore. Even David Mann took notice:

“I really got concerned. At that point I said look, I’m going to get some help. Somebody somewhere can tell me what the heck is going on.”

A spiritualist told the Manns to pour salt all around the house. The Manns kept bags of salt under their beds and even tried a homegrown exorcism. But according to Sandra, nothing helped:

“Every time we tried something… it would settle down and then it would be stronger, you know there’d be more happenings.”

Then, the house began to smell and everyone in the family suffered from bad headaches. Some of the rooms even took on a deathly chill. And then, according to Sandra, the voices began:

“What we heard was like a whole mass of voices, dull, muttering. And one woman’s voice over the top of them. But yet you could not distinguish anything they were saying.

David and Sandra tried to act blasé. But according to David, the ghost was not about to let them off the hook:

“I stopped right in the middle of the hall. I caught the smell again. And I didn’t have any explanation for, it’s like you get an idea, little voice inside your head, like your conscience or whatever it is. That little voice that you listen to. It said, ‘This is Isabella.’”

The Manns were spooked, especially Linda. She and Alan decided it was time to move out. Before long, word of the Manns’ plight reached “The Center for Paranormal Studies,” in Silver Springs, Florida. Armed with a truckload of electronic equipment, the Center’s three founders showed up at the Manns’ house. Andrew Nichols was one of the parapsychologists sent to study the Manns’ house:

“It definitely had an oppressive ambience to it, almost a depressive type of feeling. After being in the house for several hours, we all began to experience headaches.”

According to Andrew, Linda and Alan’s old bedroom received the highest amount of paranormal activity:

“It was very, very high. So I thought it would be a good idea to start taking a series of photographs at that point.”

Andrew Nichols took two Polaroid shots, one during and one after the flux in paranormal activity. The second photograph was normal. But Andrew noticed something strange in the first:

“There was a vague humanoid shape in the forefront of the picture. It may be a reflection of some unusual environmental effect. It may be a strange artifact of the human psyche, or it may be a contact with a dimension of existence that’s beyond our imagination.”

Two months later, after a visit from a local minister, the haunting appeared to stop. But David and Sandra decided they to move out soon after. Was the house in Lake Wales haunted by the spirit of someone named Isabella Kramer? Although there are no records that such a person ever lived in that area, the Manns had all the proof they needed.

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season six with Robert Stack and in season one with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Do ghosts haunt a former Civil War-era military installation in Wilmington, CA?

CASE DETAILS

The first shots of the Civil War were fired in South Carolina during April of 1861. Although most of the fighting over the next four years took place in the South, it eventually spread across the country, all the way to Wilmington, California.

In 1862, a military outpost was built near the Los Angeles Harbor. It was called the Drum Barracks and was a key center for training and processing troops. Today, all that remains is a single building, which is now a museum with some very unlikely tour guides.
Marge O’Brien is the museum’s director and curator:

“You can lock the rooms at night. In fact, very religiously. I check all the rooms. They’re locked, the lights are off, the shades are down, and you come here at 8:00 in the morning and the light in the parlor might be on and then again it might not, but the shades may be up.”

Marge was hired to restore the rundown building after it was declared a historic landmark:

“It was a very dark, very sad feeling as you walked through. And it was just the kind of a building that was saying, ‘Help me.’

Marge, a team of craftsmen, and volunteers worked for months overhauling the museum. The old building slowly came back to life, in more ways than one. According to Marge, spooky occurrences became normal:

“I’m sitting in my office and something will take my attention. Either a window will rattle, the roses will hit against the window, some the wind possibly. But something attracts me to the fact that I should be checking something. I will walk over to the parlor. Nine chances out of ten when I have this feeling and I open the door, more likely than not, the lights on the table are on. Most times, I will walk up the stairs and check the gun room. Very often, that too has the lights on and the window blinds open even though they have been closed and down. Because, the rule here is that after every tour, you pull the shades down, turn off the light and lock the door.”

Yasmin Malyeri, one of the volunteers, also began to believe that the building was haunted:

“I put down the blinds and turned off the light and locked the door and left. Came downstairs and left the building. There was nobody around. When I looked up, I saw the blind went up really slowly. It gave the impression that someone was holding it, you know, someone was doing it.”

Fred Duran, an exterminator for the city of Los Angeles, became a believer during one of his regular stops at the museum:

“To me, a ghost was like Casper the Friendly Ghost, or some movie or something. I guess one doesn’t believe in them until you are really convinced. As I got into the kitchen that morning, I heard some footsteps behind me and I thought that it was the caretaker.

According to Fred, a man’s voice behind him said, “I need to get some water.” Fred says he didn’t pay much attention. Then the man asked, “Have you seen Maria?”

According to Fred:

“As I turned around, there was this guy there, and I thought it was kinda odd because he was in a civil war outfit. So as I was going out, I saw the caretaker there and the workmen also, and I just asked him, I said, ‘Hey, the guy that lives here takes his job seriously.’ And they said, ‘You saw the Captain’s ghost.’”

Marge O’Brien says she believes Fred:

“If Fred said he saw it, he saw it. I have no doubts in that. Fred’s a very honest man. My reaction is, I wonder why he had to come now, and why to Fred”

Marge asked psychic Barbara Conner to search the museum for ghosts. According to Barbara, the Drum Barracks was full of restless spirits and she claims to have met several of them in the officer’s lounge. Two were playing cards, another stood by the window looking through the curtains. But, according to Barbara, one phantom seemed more aggressive than the rest:

“He looked at me and he said, “I want this chair closer to the fireplace because I’m cold.” He also said his boot is too tight for him.”

Marge said that information rang a bell:

“What was interesting is my research showed that Colonel Curtis, who was the commander here the longest, had frostbitten his left foot when he was fighting Indians up in Washington. Right around the ankle, above where the nerve endings were, there was a great deal of pain which he suffered much of his life. He would wear a boot that was a size smaller so that he could have more control of that foot and he dragged it. There is no way Barbara could have known that when she walked into the room. I had just started to uncover this research.”

Barbara says that she continued to have visions upstairs, which seemed to explain some of the strange noises:

“I told Marge, I said, ‘There’s a little boy here. And he’s throwing the ball up against the wall.’ She says, ‘Well, we’ve heard this thump, thump thump, and we couldn’t figure out what it is.’ And I said, “Well, that’s it. He’s throwing this ball up against the wall. If you want him to stop, just tell him to stop and he’ll stop.’”

At the end of the tour, Barbara said she “saw” the ghosts of Colonel Curtis and his officers in a planning session:

“The Colonel was standing there at the table, and when we came in, he left what he was doing and went over and started digging in this box. And he turned to me, and mentally projected that he wants his award. He wants the award. He’s trying to find an award. And I said, ‘What award?’ And he says, ‘I have an award, I want my award, and I want it on that wall.’”

Marge O’Brien said she had no information about Colonel Curtis having an award or a plaque on his wall:

“But I discovered later that when he left Washington, Colonel Curtis did receive an award for his work with the Indians. And possibly that could have been the plaque.”

Do the long-dead spirits of the Civil War still roam the drum barracks at this log-abandoned military base? Those who have experienced the hauntings believe the museum is alive with history.

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season five with Robert Stack and in season four with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Jim and Katherine Tatum experience a series of supernatural occurrences in their new home.

CASE DETAILS

In a quiet suburb near Atlanta, Georgia, Jim and Kay Tatum built a new home, with plans to retire. But in January of 1986, five months after they moved in, the Tatum’s began to experience a series of incidents that would ultimately force them to put their house up for sale. One night, Kay Tatum couldn’t sleep. She sensed a strange presence in the hall outside her bedroom. When she got up to investigate, Kay caught a glimpse of a man walking past her open door:

“It was definitely a man, and he was swinging his arms lightly, and his head was slightly bent, and he walked briskly past me. At first I thought it was my husband. And I went into the bedroom and there my husband was in the bed, so I thought we had a burglar.”

Jim searched the house:

“There was no evidence of any entry, or of anyone having been in the house. So I thought perhaps Kay had just been using an overactive imagination.”

Shortly after the incident, Kay began to suspect that it may have not been an actual living person at all:

“I had fear, and I was perplexed about what happened. And while I was tossing and turning, I suddenly remembered that I didn’t hear any sound as he passed me. I still am unable to figure out why it happened.”

Two months passed without further incident. Then, one night in March, Jim was working upstairs on the house. He stopped when Kay called him down to dinner, and, as usual, made sure to unplug his drill. As the evening wore on, Jim decided to watch a movie, while Kay went upstairs to read. One hour later, Kay heard the sound of the drill outside her room. She assumed Jim was teasing her about having seen a ghost. But before long, she felt the joke had gone on long enough. But when she got to the hallway, it was empty, and the drill was unplugged. Kay Tatum:

“I was really frightened and I reached down and felt on it and it was ice cold. It had not been turned on.”

Now, Jim too started to believe something strange might be occurring:

“I was very confused, too. I knew very well that something was happening because Kay is very level-headed. And she was truly frightened.”

The strange events continued. One night, Kay heard the sound of coins falling in a bowl. But she was alone in the room. Another time, while cooking, Kay felt two sharp tugs on her blouse:

“After that incident, I decided we had a problem in this house. There was something going on. It wasn’t something that we could understand or explain, but there was something definitely going on.”

The occurrences all seemed to center around Kay. Terrified by what was happening in their house, Jim and Kay turned to an expert for help, parapsychologist William Roll:

“The question comes up, why is this family having these experiences? Is there some sort of ghost that has come back to haunt them for some unknown reason? What’s taking place? A lot of people have these experiences. It’s part of who we are as humans, to have these so-called psychic experiences.”

Dr. Roll believes that memories can actually be transferred to physical objects. These residual memories can be triggered by ordinary people.

It wasn’t long before Jim finally had his first strange experience. It started with a small bell. An early riser, Jim always got up hours before Kay. When Kay woke up, she would ring the bell if she needed anything upstairs. One day, Jim heard what he assumed was Kay ringing the bell:

“I’d grown used to climbing the stairs after hearing the bell. And so I did so, and it wasn’t Kay. She was asleep. So I went in and looked at the bell, and it was there. I obviously heard something else, other than the bell.”

After the third time this happened, the Tatum’s decided to make up a code in order to outwit the entity. Kay would ring the bell three times if she wanted Jim to come upstairs. One morning Jim heard the call:

“It rang three times. I knew this was Kay, because this was our signal, but Kay was sound asleep. And the bell was in the other bedroom, where it stays. I went in and looked at it. I turned around and walked out the door, and the thing rang again! So, I began to, to see how Kay felt. I was frightened. My hair stood up on my neck. I told Kay then, no more bell. I’m not going to answer that bell anymore. And that bell has not rung since.”

William Roll is no stranger to these types of incidents:

“There are a number of haunting cases that are not very striking, not very strong, but where the phenomenon is, nevertheless, quite disturbing to the family. It might be a bell ringing, a fleeting glimpse of an apparition. The events are trivial, but they’re deeply upsetting to the family because they don’t fit into the picture that most of us have of the world. And that image of the physical world, particularly of our home, is intricately related to who we picture ourselves as being.”

In the end, things got so bad that the Tatum’s moved out of their home and put it up for sale.

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season one with Robert Stack and season seven with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

A ghost called Resurrection Mary haunts the city of Chicago.

CASE DETAILS

In January of 1979, a Chicago cab driver stopped to pick up a female passenger at the front gates of Resurrection Cemetery, the final resting place of more than 150,000 souls. But before he could let her in, the mysterious woman disappeared. The cab driver had just met Chicago’s most famous ghost, Resurrection Mary.

Richard Crowe was a local historian and folklorist at the time of the sighting:

“I think that of all the ghost stories worth believing in, Resurrection Mary is the one with the best documentation. The witnesses that I’ve found are remarkably level-headed. And they’re primarily blue collar, middle-class types who have steady jobs and who have no other major claims to psychic encounters in their lives.”

As the story goes, the first person to ever encounter Resurrection Mary was Jerry Palus. The year was 1939. The place…a Chicago dance hall where Jerry was a regular.

Jerry was captivated by a young blonde woman and immediately asked her to dance. He learned little about her, except that her name was Mary and she lived on the south side of town. He danced with the young woman all night. When it was time to leave, Jerry offered Mary a ride home.

Before his death in 1992, Jerry was interviewed about his encounter with Resurrection Mary. He described the events of that evening:

“As we walked along to the street she says well you might as well take me down to Archer Road. And I said what for? I said you live up here where you told me. And she says no I want to go out to Archer Road.”

Jerry stopped in front of Resurrection Cemetery and let Mary out of the car. It was at that moment that she vanished before his eyes. Jerry admitted he was perplexed, but certainly willing to forgive one unexplained disappearance.

Still wanting to know more about the mysterious woman, the very next day Jerry drove to the house where Mary had said she lived. Jerry found the house with little trouble. The woman who answered the door was Mary’s mother. When Jerry asked if he could see her daughter, the woman told him that Mary had been dead for five years.

According to Richard Crowe, it then dawned on Jerry that Mary was no ordinary woman:

“It’s then, Jerry said, that he understood why the woman he was dancing with that night was ice cold to the touch. He had worked in a funeral home for a while and it was the touch of a corpse.”

Years later, Richard Crowe learned the ghost was believed to be the restless spirit of a young woman named Mary Bregovy. Mary Bregovy had been killed in a traffic accident in 1934, a month before her 21st birthday. She was laid to rest in Resurrection Cemetery in her favorite white gown.

Over the years, Resurrection Mary has been seen time and time again, at dance clubs, in taxis, and walking outside the cemetery, looking for someone to take her home.

In 1980, Clare Rudnicki was driving along the front of Resurrection Cemetery, when she too spotted Mary:

“I really didn’t think there was any ghost. You hear these stories and these old ghost tales but it’s never happened to me. But now I must say I think I’m changing my mind.
I was just looking out the window as we were going down the street. And on the right hand-side of the road there was a girl walking. She was bright, very bright, like illuminating. She was just walking very slowly. I remember thinking oh my god it’s Resurrection Mary. And I can feel my stomach starting to turn. I was very frightened, I have to admit. It did scare me.”

Clare’s husband, Mark Rudnicki, was also in the car:

“We all went past it, turned around and came back and by the time we’d gotten back to where we’d originally seen her it had gone. Vanished.”

In October of 1989, Janet Kalal and a friend were out for an evening drive. After about an hour, they found themselves at Resurrection Cemetery. It was then, Janet recalled, that a pale young woman stepped in front of the car:

“There was no impact, there was no… bump to say that you know I had hit something. But I know she ran out… and I hit her. She was all in white and her hair and the dress were… flowing back. It was like a stream backwards, you know away from her. And I just saw this profile of a young woman.”

Does the ghost of Mary Bregovy really haunt Chicago? Or is Resurrection Mary just an urban myth? In any case, should you find yourself driving in the city late one night and happen to spot a pale young woman in a flowing white gown, you might think twice about offering her a ride.

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season six with Robert Stack and in season three with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Reports of ghosts, poltergeists, and apparitions aboard the Queen Mary.

CASE DETAILS

The famous transatlantic liner the Queen Mary is now permanently docked in Long Beach, California. On her decks and in her corridors, people have seen ghostly figures and heard mysterious sounds they just can’t explain. Server Carol Leyden had such an encounter:

“I’d been here about 14 years when I first had the first experience of actually seeing what I thought to be a ghost. I was in the work area, and for some reason I picked up a cup of coffee, went out to the tables, and there was a lady sitting there. I was so fascinated by her dress. She appeared to be in a late afternoon cocktail-type dress from the 40s. She had dark hair, rolled at the sides, no makeup on, she seemed to be very pale, but I never saw her move. I left the table, went up about ten feet, turned around because I wanted to take another look, and there was nothing there.”

Former ship tour guide, Nancy Anne, once described herself as a hardened skeptic. Not anymore:

“One day I was standing on the stairs of the pool, and out of the corner of my right eye I saw a woman, probably in her 60s or 70s, in black and white. So I went down the stairs and around the pillar, expecting to find her standing there, but she wasn’t anywhere to be found. It was only a matter of seconds… she couldn’t have gone anywhere.”

Some say that one way or another, all places are haunted, that they hold on to memories of past events. Perhaps that explains the ghostly apparitions and unexplained sounds that haunt the Queen Mary.

The Queen Mary took her maiden voyage in 1936. During the five day trip across the Atlantic, she was a floating party, a symbol of luxury travel in a gilded age. After her arrival in Long Beach in 1967, one of the first people to work on board was marine engineer John Smith. Several times over a two-month period, John heard something unusual in the ship’s bow where there should only have been silence. According to John:

“I could hear the sound of metal tearing, water rushing. And then, men screaming. It sounded like there had been a rupture of the ship’s hull. It was frightful. I went up to the extreme bow section of the ship. The sound was there, but there was no water and nothing to cause it. I don’t believe in supernatural things, but in all my experiences as a marine engineer, I’d never seen anything like this.”

Years later, John read about a tragedy dating from World War II. After being converted into a troop ship, the Queen Mary accidentally collided with a British cruiser named the Curacoa. Over 300 men were killed. The Queen Mary’s bow sliced the Curacoa in half.
It all made sense to John:

“After I read that article, I was so shook up and so overwhelmed, the very area where I heard that mysterious water rushing was the exact same area that was damaged when the ship hit the Curacoa. I said, ‘This is what it would have sounded and felt like if I had been in that compartment at the time.’ But I knew it couldn’t be.”

Dozens of other sightings have been reported. Late one night, in the pool area, a maintenance supervisor, Kathy Love, and her co-worker heard mysterious sounds. As Kathy tells it:

“We came into the pool and I heard giggling. The sound of a little girl playing in the area. And at that point, I noticed there was splashing. The splashing stopped, the giggling continued, and we observed the wet footprints of a small child walking across into the locker room. I know that I saw what I saw. I’m not sure exactly why I saw it. But I know it was there.”

Several other encounters have occurred in what’s called shaft alley, deep within the ship, near the engine room. Here, during a routine fire drill in 1966, a man named John Pedder was crushed to death by a watertight door. While some believe Pedder still haunts the area, Nancy Anne said she’s sure he does:

“I was working in the capacity of a lead guide, which meant my job was to close down the tour route and make sure that there weren’t any stragglers behind. And I don’t know why I turned around, but I turned around and standing right behind me on the step was a man. He had on blue overalls and they were dirty. When I stepped aside to let him go by, he wasn’t there. He was gone. I don’t necessarily believe any other ghost stories that other people have come up with. I only know what I saw, and I only believe what I saw, with my own eyes.”

There’s nothing like actually seeing a ghost turn a skeptic into a believer. And judging from the recurring stories, if you want to become a believer, the Queen Mary is a good place to start.

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season one with Robert Stack and season four with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Robert Stack and Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

A young girl sees dead people… quite literally.

CASE DETAILS

Is it possible to bridge the gap between the living and the dead? In the small town of Ellerslie, Georgia, eight-year-old Heidi Wyrick apparently demonstrated the astounding ability to speak with the dead. It all began in February of 1989, just after Heidi’s family had moved to Ellerslie. According to Heidi, a man named “Con” appeared at the front door:

“He had white hair and he had a t-shirt on with blood all over it. And he had a bandage on his hand with blood on it.”

Lisa Wyrick, Heidi’s mother, thought someone was trying to kidnap her daughter:

“So I brought Heidi in and I locked all the doors and I got the butcher knife out of the… drawer and I called my husband to come home.”

When Andy Wyrick arrived home, he and Lisa searched the entire neighborhood for someone who fit Con’s description. However, they came up empty handed. Then shortly after her visit from Con, Heidi told her mother about meeting another man. According to Lisa, this time the man’s name was Mr. Gordy:

“I thought that Con and Gordy was the same person, so I thought his name was Con Gordy. And that’s when I started asking everybody. Did they, have they ever heard of a name Con Gordy?”

Lisa happened to mention Con and Mr. Gordy to her sister who had just bought the house next door. As it turned out, a man named James S. Gordy was the former owner of her sister’s house. Lisa was shocked:

“When I saw Mr. Gordy’s name on the deed, I was terrified. Because I knew that the previous owners were there years ago… So I knew that Mister Gordy… had to have been dead.”

Catherine Ledford’s family had owned the house next to the Wyricks. When Lisa got in touch with her, Catherine verified that James Gordy had died in 1974:

“I knew Mister Gordy when I was a small child. And Mister Gordy owned a real estate company in Columbus and for many, many years he was a Sunday school superintendent at our church up here, Ellison Methodist Church.”

Catherine Ledford had no photographs of Mr. Gordy, but she corroborated Heidi’s description. Mr. Gordy had gray hair, always wore a suit and tie, and shiny black shoes. She brought over photographs of her family. Heidi began looking through the photos:

“I had never seen any of those people. And when I got to the bottom, there was this little bitty picture.”

In the picture, Heidi recognized a man with a bandage on his arm and blood on his shirt. According to Catherine Ledford, Heidi had identified Catherine’s Uncle Lon:

“Lon lived here when he was a young man. He died in 1957 of cancer. And he lost his hand, I would say before he was 20-years-old in a cotton gin up here in Ellerslie.”

Heidi’s mother Lisa was now convinced that Heidi’s friends were not just figments of her imagination… they were actual dead people:

“When I found out… his name really wasn’t Con it was Lon, it scared me to death because I knew Heidi was really seeing something…”

For the next four years, Heidi continued to encounter the benevolent spirits of the two men—James Gordy and Lon Batchelor—both of whom had long been dead. Then in 1993, Heidi’s mother became pregnant. Not long after, an evil spirit came to visit. Lisa Wyrick remembered Heidi’s change in behavior:

“Heidi had never been scared of anything. She had never been scared of Con. She had never been scared of Mister Gordy. But when she saw the dark figure in our hallway, she was hysterical.”

According to Lisa, the new spirit became a frequent and sometimes violent guest:

“At first we had… talked about moving. But like I told him I said I don’t think it would be so good to move. Because wherever we go, she’s just got that gift… she’s going to see people from the past, or people that have been dead.”

On February 3, 1994, Heidi’s baby sister, Jordan, was born. Two weeks later, Lisa noticed that Heidi’s other-wordly visitations took a horrifying turn:

“She had just deep gashes down her face. And it terrified me. I didn’t know what it was. And I couldn’t imagine what could’ve scratched her that bad.”

Heidi’s father Andy never gave his daughter’s scratches much thought. He just assumed she inadvertently scratched herself during the night. Then, two nights later, he too woke up with a searing pain:

“I had three claw marks going around my side. The next night I went to sleep and I woke up and I had three claw marks down my back. And then it happened again the next night and I woke up and had three claw marks down my chest.”

The Wyrick’s called up a noted parapsychologist, Dr. William Roll, to investigate the unusual occurrences:

“She came up with physical descriptions and with names that she apparently could not have obtained in any ordinary way. So that immediately made me interested in the case. A couple of pictures had been found of Mister Gordy. The hope was that Heidi would be able to… identify… Mister Gordy’s picture if they were presented to her with a number of other photographs.”

Incredibly, Heidi had chosen the photograph of James Gordy. For the second time, Heidi Wyrick had correctly identified her spirits from a photo line-up. Dr. Roll was now certain that Heidi’s experiences were genuine:

“Having spoken to… Heidi and… her parents I’m even more convinced that we are dealing with genuine para-psychological experiences. Then the question comes up, why are these things happening to this little girl?”

Why indeed? Was it all just coincidence? Did Heidi simply make two lucky guesses? Or does Heidi Wyrick possess some mysterious power to communicate with the dead?

Heidi is now a young woman and no longer lives in the old family home. She reports that she has not seen Mr. Gordy for years. However, she continues to see the mysterious dark figure, as well as numerous other spirits. The sightings are so frequent that Heidi now takes them in stride. Not even the dark figure can scare her.

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season seven with Robert Stack and in season three with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Is the home of Lizzie Borden a haunted vacation spot?

CASE DETAILS

On August 4, 1892, wealthy businessman Andrew Borden, and his wife, Abby, were brutally hacked to death in their home. Andrew’s 32-year-old spinster daughter, Lizzie, was arrested for the double murder. Over a century later, the scene of one of the most gruesome unsolved mysteries in U.S. history is open for business. The Borden home is now the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast.

Visitors can enjoy an informative chat about the sadistic murders while eating a breakfast of johnnycakes and mutton broth—the same meal Abby and Andrew Borden ate on their final day. Then after a long day of sightseeing, they can sleep in the same bedroom where Abby Borden’s body was discovered, lifeless on the floor.

Not surprisingly, most people do not sleep easily. According to owner Martha McGinn, many guests have reported that the inn is haunted:

“I think the apparitions and all the activity that has been happening in the house, it’s a possibility that the spirits are trying to communicate through myself, my staff, or my guests of who really committed the murders so they can rest in peace, put the story to sleep once and for all.”

Lizzie Borden was never convicted of the brutal murders. Nobody knows who committed the savage crime… Nobody, except the victims themselves, all of whom are long since dead. Or are they?

In 1968, Martha McGinn moved into the Borden house, which had been purchased by her grandparents 43 years earlier. According to Martha, she soon became aware of an unsettling presence lurking in the shadows of the aging building:

“When I was about 16 years old, I was in my bedroom reading a book, and above my room I could distinctly hear footsteps and the sound of, like marbles being played and it almost sounded like little children’s laughter.”

Later, Martha witnessed another strange phenomenon, this one far more disturbing than the last:

“ I went up the stairway, and the window at the end of the second-floor corridor just began opening and slamming shut. It was just violently going up and down. I got the creepy crawlers that time.”

Martha became convinced that a ghost was prowling her home, tormenting her at every opportunity. But who? And why? The answer to that question may have come when Martha made the mistake of entering the basement alone:

“A shadow, sort of like a silhouette, floated maybe four inches above the floor. I could tell it was a woman. I could tell it was Victorian clothes. I just turned around and ran back up the stairs. That experience really did frighten me. That actually did make my hair stand on end.”

In 1994, Martha inherited the Borden house and decided to capitalize on its infamous reputation by turning it into a very unusual bed and breakfast:

“When we first opened, I had hired my staff. Most of them, at the time, did not believe in ghosts or apparitions or anything like that. And then odd things started happening to them.”

Kerri Roderick was one of the first employees to be hired:

“I arrived at work to start cleaning the house, and I was on my last room, and I had made the bed and cleaned, dusted, and everything. And then I turned around, and there was the perfect impression of somebody laying on the bed. The indent in the pillow, in the bed. I looked at it for, like, a couple of seconds, and then I booked it out of the room. I had to leave. I was just—it scared me. ‘Cause I’d never seen anything like that before in my life.”

But the most frequent sightings occurred in the downstairs parlor, the very location where Andrew Borden was killed. Eleanor Thimbault, the night manager at the bed and breakfast, recalled one such sighting:

“I was sitting in the parlor, and on the phone, and this strange feeling came over me, a very eerie feeling. When I looked up to the kitchen door, I saw what I thought was all this smoke coming out of the kitchen, like a foggy smoke. And I thought to myself, well, that’s strange. There isn’t anybody in the kitchen cooking. Why would all this smoke be coming out? The way it traveled, very slow, until it got to the sofa—where Mr. Borden was hacked to death—and it just dissipated. I know I saw something that was out of this world. It wasn’t from this world, that’s for sure.”

Author and ghost-hunter, Katherine Ramsland, believed that Andrew and Abby Borden were trying to tell the employees who killed them. In an attempt to document the paranormal activity, Ramsland went into the basement of the bed and breakfast armed with a voice-activated recorder:

“It was very dark. And I just simply said, is anybody here? And we could see that the recorder was activated. But we could hear nothing. It was absolute silence, and yet it was clear something was being recorded. So I decided, instead of asking any more questions, I would just see what we had gotten. We shot up the steps… ‘Cause we weren’t staying down there with that, whatever it was.”

A noise from the dead or static electricity? No one knows for sure. Katherine Ramsland believes the recording is the first solid evidence that Abby and Andrew Borden are ready to share the chilling circumstances of their bloody end. And she hopes that maybe, someday, one of them will tell us what really happened on August 4, 1892.

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season eleven with Robert Stack and in season three with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Is the battlefield at Gettysburg haunted?

At Gettysburg, bodies covered the field

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

CASE DETAILS

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Three days of brutal combat at the height of the Civil War left 50,000 Union and Confederate casualties. The creeks literally ran red with blood. Some report that Gettysburg is still haunted by the ghosts of those cut down in battle. Author and historian Mark Nesbitt offered this theory as to why:

“At Gettysburg, there was so much emotional energy expended in a short period of time, from the 15-year-old kid who was scared to death that he’d never make it home, or the 40-year-old man who’d just been shot through the lungs and was dying and thinking about his family. You have to think that some of it must remain.”

Many of the ghostly sightings have been reported by Civil War re-enactors. Dressed in period costumes, they re-stage the battle, blow by blow. One re-enactor, Ray Hock, says he and a friend were approached by a haggard figure, too realistic to be just another
re-enactor:

“I think I seen a ghost. I think this guy had original equipment on. Original coat. Everything, to me, points out that it was original.”

Ray says the soldier handed them each two authentic-looking cartridges. When they looked up, the mysterious visitor had vanished.

Live ammunition hasn’t been allowed at Gettysburg for 100 years. Ray, a university expert, determined that the cartridges were genuine Civil War issue, vintage 1863.

In the summer of 1993, some friends were at Gettysburg for the battle re-enactments. One evening, as they hiked along a creek called Bloody Run, they came across a man laying in the bushes. Richard Knapp described what he saw:

“He appeared to be a man laying there, but he wasn’t solid like you and I are. I mean, he was more of a hazy mist. He was shivering ’cause it looked like he was in a lot of pain. I couldn’t go no further. Emotionally, I broke down and cried. I was shaking. I had to actually have somebody come back and lead me out of the trail.”

The terror of Gettysburg was not limited to the battlefield. According to Mark Nesbitt, Army surgeons, lacking medicine and proper instruments, handled most injuries with one quick treatment—amputation:

“Many of the men underwent amputations of limbs without any anesthetic whatsoever, except perhaps a shot of good old-fashioned army whiskey. So the Civil War hospital then was probably as close to a descent into hell on Earth as these Civil War soldiers would have ever gotten to.”

One building, Pennsylvania Hall, was a field hospital during the battle. Today it’s the offices of Gettysburg College. But some say the cries of the wounded still echo here. One night close to midnight, two school administrators were alone in the building. They were using the elevator when the doors suddenly opened onto a real-looking Civil War hospital. Mark Nesbitt described what the women experienced:

“The stench of a hospital was all around. As they peered out on this, of course they began to panic. There was no place to go. Suddenly, one of the orderlies turned to them and looked at them beseechingly, as if he needed help with this horrible task that he was doing or perhaps help to get out of this forced incarceration he’d been in for the last 13 decades.”

That night, the two officials told their story to a campus security officer. Timon Linn,
chief of security at Gettysburg College, remembered the incident:

“I would have to say that something frightened them. I can’t explain it. Although I don’t believe in ghosts, I guess to a certain extent I believe that they saw maybe what they said they saw only because I know them as credible people.”

Is it possible these ghostly sightings were imagined? Or, will the spirits of Gettysburg’s soldiers remain here forever?

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season eight with Robert Stack and in season two with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Does a century old murder victim haunt a resort in upstate New York?

CASE DETAILS

For generations, the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York have been a favorite vacation spot for the famous and the infamous. One summer night in 1988, several employees of the Covewood Lodge on Big Moose Lake, including Rhonda Bousselot, were approaching the staff lodge. Rhonda led the pack, unaware that someone, or something, might be waiting inside:

“I walked into the staff lodge, straight up the stairs with my hand out, reaching for the string, which is how to turn on the light. As I approached the top of the stairs and just before I was ready to turn on the light, a feeling came over me that somebody was right there. More or less, I stopped in my tracks and really just didn’t move. I didn’t have an overwhelming feeling of fright, but something definitely or someone was there, and it just kind of took my breath away.”

But the real show was outside. According to Rhonda, her friends were witnessing a spine-tingling vision:

“All three of them had the same exact story. It lingered for just a few seconds, and then moved away. All three of them saw the ghost. I didn’t see anything myself, but I felt that somebody was right there, and it was just a strange feeling.”

But who is haunting Big Moose Lake? People there believe it is the ghost of the young and beautiful Grace Brown. In 1906, her brutal murder shocked the nation. Decades later, Hollywood turned the notorious case into a hit film, “A Place in the Sun.” Hollywood portrayed Grace as an unattractive nag. But in truth, Grace Brown was a naive, lovely 19-year-old who worked at the Gillette skirt factory in Cortland, New York. It was there, in 1905, that she met the handsome and charming Chester Gillette, the factory owner’s nephew.

Author Craig Brandon has written about the infamous Grace Brown murder:

“Chester Gillette was considered quite a catch by the people in town because he was popular and he was athletic and he was handsome. I’m sure a lot of women in Cortland were interested in him.”

From the start, it was a scandalous romance. According to Craig Brandon, Chester convinced Grace to see him without a chaperone which, in those days, put her reputation at risk:

“I think she saw him as the ideal person, that he was everything that she wanted. She was in love probably for the first time in her life, and she wanted to see this through no matter what.”

For Chester, it was a secret affair. He never took Grace out in public. He never acknowledged their relationship. According to Craig Brandon, Chester was frequently seen with other young women, especially those from the town’s wealthier families:

“Her friends were warning her that he wasn’t what he seemed to be, that he was something different, and I think that she had no experience with that type of person. And so she was seeing what she wanted to see rather than what her friends were telling her.”

But Grace could not resist Chester and she soon discovered she was pregnant. At the time, unwed mothers were outcasts. Grace begged Chester to marry her, but he stalled as long as he could. Finally, in July, 1906, Chester took Grace to the Adirondacks. She assumed it was a wedding trip. According to Craig Brandon, they rented a rowboat at Big Moose Lake from a man named Robert Morrison:

“Morrison expected them to come back around dinnertime. And when they didn’t come back, he thought that was somewhat suspicious.”

The next morning, Morrison organized a search party. The rowboat had capsized. A short distance from it, they found Grace’s body. Two days later, police found Chester Gillette in a nearby hotel. At first, he denied even knowing Grace Brown. Then, he claimed Grace had drowned herself in despair because he didn’t love her anymore. Few believed him. He was tried and convicted of first degree murder. On March 30, 1908, Chester Gillette died in the electric chair. Had justice been served? Apparently not enough to satisfy the restless spirit of Grace Brown.

Lynda Lee Macken had her own encounter with Grace Brown a few months after Rhonda Bousselot’s:

“I was walking down toward the lake with my flashlight and the light was getting dimmer and dimmer. By the time I got to the edge of the lake and the rocks, my flashlight wasn’t working. So I had to turn around and go back… I was awestruck, and not only was I certain that I was looking at a ghost, but I had a very strong feeling of sadness. She was very sad.”

Was it the ghost of Grace Brown? Over the years, there have been continual sightings. And many wonder if her spirit has been trapped at Big Moose Lake since the day she was drowned by her faithless lover.

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season eight with Robert Stack and in season two with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.