S18 Ep44: Ghosts, ghouls, haints, spirits and phantoms (Sn. 18 Ep. 44)
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The quarter pounder with cheese had many great things. Maple flavored griddle cakes isn't one of them. McDonald's breakfast comes first. Good evening and welcome to Monsters Among Us. I am your guide, Derek Hayes.

And I'm right back at it with a brand new episode. A themed installment, as most of our Tuesday releases are. And this week the topic is rather broad. We're casting a wider net, so to speak. So if you're a fan of ghosts, spirits, entities, you've come to the right place. Because each of tonight's stories will be ghost related. So let's knock on some walls and rattle some chains. It's time to do some haunting.

And to kick us off tonight, we begin in my state of California. Please welcome Michelle to tonight's program.

Hi, Derek. This is Michelle from Orange County. This is about 2018 when my boyfriend and my two middle school-aged daughters moved into a house that we were renting. And it had been a family home for, I don't know, 30, 40 years. They'd lived there all their lives, raised their children. And it had been remodeled after the parents died and the daughter was the relationship

the real estate manager, if you will. And she was really looking for a family, wanted kids there, was very protective of the home, wanted it to represent what I guess the parents had always had it be when they were living.

So we were the first people to move in after it's been remodeled. This is in Los Angeles, California, by the way. And we had things start in the beginning, such as, you know, hearing things, hearing footsteps a lot in the attic. That's easy enough to kind of wave off and say maybe it's just the house settling. But my boyfriend had two of the bigger experiences.

In our master bedroom at night, one time he saw a woman standing over the bed just looking at papers, not acknowledging him, just an older woman shuffling through papers. And then another time he was asleep and he felt me put my arms around him and hug him. And he turned over to face me and I was on the other end of the bed facing away, found asleep.

So he assumed that that was the woman of the house. Maybe she thought her husband was still there. He had just recently passed before we moved in. The only experience I really had, I have really bad vision, so I can't see anything at night. Color is about it, without my contacts. So I never see anything, but I would always feel something sit on the bed and would assume it was my cat. So I'd kind of shuffle my legs under the covers,

to see if it was her. And it never was. I could definitely feel something there pressing down the covers, but not my cat. And then one time when I did have my contacts in, I was taking a shower and I just saw a head really quickly pop through the pocket door. It was closed. Just the head came through the door, looked over at me and then went right back out.

And it happened so quick, I couldn't even tell you what the person looked like. But just a really quick pop in, pop out, which was pretty creepy, but no bad vibes. It was always good vibes, but that's my story. Thank you. Thank you, Michelle. A ghostly embrace. As strange as that may be, I suppose it could be much, much worse. But if you liked what you heard here from Michelle, you're really going to enjoy tonight's episode.

But first, we must take a brief break to hear from tonight's sponsors. You know, if you ever had a primary care doctor with a literal six-month wait to get in for a visit, or maybe you have to drive an hour to see that one specialist in your insurance network,

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Now tonight's next ghostly account originates out of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Kelsey, welcome to tonight's episode.

Hi Derek, this is Kelsey from Virginia. I have a story. This is actually my husband's story, but he is not the type to watch anything paranormal, anything spooky, anything like that. So he would never call in himself, so I'll call in for him. My husband is a state trooper.

And he was on 81 one night. He was just driving. He was working midnight shift. I think he was heading north on 81. And he said he was just driving along and he saw on the side of the road on the interstate a figure. He said it was just like a white figure that was dressed in a dated gown or a dated dress.

He thought there was a person walking by the guardrail on the interstate. There's a crossover not far up. So he hit the crossover, turned around so he could, you know, go help whoever it was. And when he turned around, that person was gone. He said it was a very white glow of a person, but in a very dated dress gown.

He described it looked like a female, but he saw it. And then when he turned around to see, you know, if he could do anything, they were gone. I know there's been stories on here before about seeing figures in the road, but that's his story. So I'm going to share it out short. Love your podcast. And thank you very much. Thank you, Kelsey, for sharing his story. I wonder how many officers have seen something similar and simply didn't report it. After all,

A ghostly woman on the side of the road is one of the most popular paranormal tropes out there. And I bet the two worlds collide much more often than you'd probably think they would. And you know, speaking of tropes, if you're playing Ghost Bingo at home, you can fill in the ghostly hitchhiker space along with the ghostly hug space. I'm sure both of those are on your card. I made this game up, by the way. As far as I know, there's no such thing as ghostly bingo.

But that doesn't mean there's no such thing as ghosts. Just ask Aiden of the state of Washington. Hi there! My name is Aiden. I'm calling from Washington. This particular story happened a few years ago in Bellingham when I was attending Western Washington University.

This is kind of a weird story because we did a bunch of research. We were trying to figure out if there were any histories of hauntings. And there's a bunch at the university, like in the library, but nothing in our dorm stack where this happened. We were in some of the newer old dorms. We were in Ridgeway Gamma. We had this week of weird phenomenon. And it started one night.

I was in a three-person room. They really shoved people in there. So I was in a loft bed, and then directly across from me, parallel, there was a bunk bed with my best friend at the time, Jess, on the bottom bunk, and our other roommate on the top bunk. And I woke up in the middle of the night, which was pretty strange for me. I woke up at like 3 in the morning, and I woke up sitting up, looking left down at Jess,

who woke up at the exact same time as me sitting up. And it was super freaky. That's never happened to us before. We both were woken up, sitting up, looking at each other.

And we were both woken up from super weird dreams. Mine was this dinosaur dream that I can still vividly remember. And she was having this other traumatic, like, war dream. And we were just really freaked out. You know, we turned on the light, woke up our other roommate. We were like, what the heck is going on? And I had scratches all over my hands.

We were just super freaked out. So the three of us are talking to our other roommates and we're like, "Hey, like something's fishy here. Like this is super abnormal." And our other two roommates who were in the suite but in a different room were like, "Ghosts aren't real. You guys are being crazy." So we were like, "No, like it just feels different in here." So as the week goes by, every single night we wake up in the middle of the night

with weird dreams. Every single night we have weird dreams. And this was abnormal for both of us. You know, we'll dream, but every single night was a vivid, really intense kind of like war or apocalypse or something.

Super trippy dream. We were joking around and we decided that we had a ghost and we named him Ted. And at the very moment that we named him Ted, all three roommates were sitting in the room and our other roommate, our skeptical roommate, was sitting in the room with us, kind of making fun of us. And right when we said, okay, we're going to name you Ted,

the lights in the room flickered. Like, I kid you not, it was super weird. It happened for a whole week. It didn't seem vicious, but the room felt weird. Everything felt heavy. And we just continued to get, like, pretty much no sleep that entire week because every time we'd wake up in the middle of the night, it would just get freakier and freakier. And then exactly a week later, I think it was a Tuesday,

We both slept through the night and nothing ever happened again. And the lights never flickered and we had dreamless, normal, peaceful sleep. So we looked into it. We can't find anything in Ridgeway Gamma. It's an old school, maybe something passed through. We have no idea. It turned our skeptical roommate into a little bit less of a skeptic though to watch us go through that every single day.

Anyways, thanks Derek. Kind of a weird story, but I appreciate the opportunity to share it. Love your podcast. Bye. Thank you, Aiden. And don't worry, all these calls are pretty weird. And if you had Ted the Ghost on your bingo card, well, you probably cheated because no one had old Ted on their card. But it does sound like for at least a little while, Aiden had him right there in the room.

So thank you again, Aiden, for taking the time to share that spooky experience here with us. Now, folks, if you would like to share your spooky experience, give my hotline a call at 888-608-NIGHT. That's 888-608-N-I-G-H-T. Or shoot me a voice memo to MonstersAmongUsPodcast at gmail.com. I'll tell you, I can't wait to hear from you. And we can't wait to hear from Cheyenne in New Hampshire.

Neither.

Hi Derek, Cheyenne again. On season five, I think it was episode four, a man called in about a college experience where he thought his dorm was haunted or he saw a person sitting at his bed. And it reminded me that when I moved off to college with my best friend, we shared a room, we were dorm mates, it was so cute. But it was up at UNH, we lived in Christensen Hall, which is super old.

We were very creeped out by this room.

and I had these really easy classes. So I'd come back from class and sit and do homework for an hour or two and then watch Netflix and fall asleep, take naps and then get up for the next class, so on and so forth. So I was alone in that room a lot. And I remember one day I took a nap. It was midday, probably like September, October. The sun was still up and I woke up

to the sound of something like being thrown off of my desk.

which was directly across from my bed, 5, 10 feet. Like, you know how tiny a dorm is. And I looked over, and there was some stuff that was knocked over on my desk. And I was like, okay, that's weird. The way I was raised, I figured it was a ghost. So I was like, hey, that's not really polite. Please don't knock my stuff over. I just want to go to school. Like, I'll leave you alone if you leave me alone. But in the middle of the night, sometimes we'd hear, like,

scratching. We had this weird cabinet thing that every room had. There was like a closet on each side.

a big old mirror in the middle with like a dresser. And then on the top, there are these cabinets kind of, they lift up instead of opening like a cabinet would. So you have to lift it up to get into that weird cabinet. I remember one night I heard scratching up there and I was petrified. My best friend heard it too. I was like, "Hey, so sorry if we're upsetting you, please don't hurt us. You're freaking us out."

and I was really into the show Supernatural at the time. So I put some symbol that was from the show up there, which was funny because we ended up forgetting it, and the next people probably thought that, like, witches lived in there. But we would hear, like, knocks at the door, someone jiggling the door handles. Super creepy, especially because, like, you're in college. There are drunk kids. I think it would be scarier for a human to walk into my room than a ghost. It was freaky, and...

I'm going to preface this next part by saying I was taking my fifth year of Latin, but my best friend said that she woke up in the middle of the night and I was talking in my sleep

and it was all in latin which sounds horrifying i had apparently said something along the lines of like new vanguam which means new blood and she was petrified she told me about it in the morning i still think it was probably just like i was studying latin before bed and then she was scared and she picked like two words that happened to mean something terrifying

Thank you Cheyenne. Now like Aiden, Cheyenne too experienced this haunting while attending college. That part you maybe did have on your card. Because it seems like every single campus in the country has at least a story or two. I know my alma mater certainly did.

We had a hat man that haunted the theater. One of our sororities was haunted by a pledge that died on nearby railroad tracks. Outside of town there was a haunted road, a haunted woods, and a haunted old farmhouse. And I've linked to a list of all the hauntings in and around Bowling Green State University in these show notes if you're curious. But I don't know what it is about schools that make them so appealing to the afterlife. Maybe it's all that energy. Maybe it's the history.

Maybe a little of both. Either way, we thank you again, Cheyenne, for sharing your school's spooky secrets. Now, folks, I'm going to sneak in one more entry before our next scheduled break. And a huge thanks for supporting our sponsors, by the way. They are the grease that keeps this machine pumping out calls like John's from parts unknown.

Hi Derek, this is John Collin. I did have a very interesting unexplainable situation happen at work today. I work as a metallurgist in the steel industry and I was talking with one of the union employees, a lady that I know there, and it was back in the inspection lab in the prep room and all of a sudden we heard this like little clanking. It almost sounded like little gunshots.

Then we look and there are these little samples that what we do is we do testing and we do polishing and etching. These happen to be hardness samples. We check the hardness before you ship it. But there are these four little samples that were on the platform that came down the stairs that were thrown down the steps. Nobody was up there, no footsteps. We checked it out afterwards

about 15 feet away from the stairs on a table, there's a box of metal samples and a plastic sleeve and like mostly tissue paper. But yeah, they would have had to gone from that table 15 feet stairs and then thrown another 15 feet down the steps. It's really odd. You know, a couple employees have basically said that that's happened before, stuff like that in the past. You know, your footsteps upstairs and there's nobody up there.

And then there's an adjacent area, which is a bathroom where one union employee told me that he at one point saw basically a figure in their greens. It's like the mill outfit. And then he looked back and he wasn't there. So yeah, anyway, I know there was old steel mills that could be all kinds of activities. Yeah, it was pretty crazy. Definitely had no explanation for that. Anyway, thanks a lot. You keep up the good work. All right, take care. Bye.

We sure do appreciate it, John. Thanks for calling in. As if work wasn't hard enough. Without some unseen force tossing metal at you. Now I'll be right back with more Ghost and Ghouls. So don't touch that dial. Something catastrophic happened to you or your spouse. This might not be a big deal. The quarter pounder with cheese had many great things. Maple flavored griddle cakes isn't one of them.

Now could you imagine if you had to hide things from your ghost? Well, that's exactly what Ryan in Ohio has experienced. And here is his story.

Hey, Derek. My name is Ryan. I'm from Dayton, Ohio. I can see Wright-Potterson Air Force Base from where I live. I just want to call and tell you about my story. My wife and I lived in a haunted house for about 10 years. The first couple of weeks was a little odd. No big deal.

We felt some stuff going on. We had a black lab and a cat. They were acting seriously different than they normally do. Then we started hearing boot prints from the attic.

We couldn't understand anything. We actually just realized that we were living in a haunted house. We took kind of the advice of some shows that were on TV and you don't want to talk around in the house about what your plan is because they can hear every word you say. So we got in the car

went around the block and we made a plan that we would firmly go in and ask the ghost to leave. Well, that was a big mistake. At that point, it was probably the third month that we lived in this place. But yeah, my wife was positioned about five feet in front of me. I was standing behind her a little bit to the left and

We were talking up to the attic actually. Why ghosts prefer the attic, I have no clue, but they do. We asked the ghost to leave, we're pretty firm about it. And we heard footsteps from the other side of the house to our side of the house. And it walked down the attic stairs.

And it walked through. I'm not saying by. I'm saying through. My wife, then me, walked through the kitchen and went down the basement stairs. And my wife...

Thank you, Ryan.

Now, I bet living that close to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base means that ghosts aren't the only strange things that you've encountered. I can only imagine the things you see there at night. Now, as far as ghost eavesdropping goes, I've never heard of that before. But what a wild concept. Imagine if you had to hide everything from the spirits you think might be dwelling in your walls. And imagine having to go to your vehicle just to have a conversation about how to deal with it.

Though from the sounds of things that didn't work out all that well. And you know I can't help but think that this is basically like having a pet in your house. You just can't mention certain words. Walk, food, treats, that sort of thing. And if you can't tell I got quite a kick out of this scenario. So thank you again Ryan for taking the time to share it. Now folks sometimes on these Tuesday episodes I like to drop a few numbers on you regarding the subject of the week.

And surprise, surprise, this week is no different. And tonight's figures are on behalf of a civil science survey conducted in August of 2024, polling some 2,036 people. Would you believe that 4 in 10 adults believe in some sort of ghost or spirit? And would you believe that both men and women believe in the supernatural or the paranormal in roughly the same numbers? 63% for men and 65% in women.

Frankly, I expected men to believe far less. It's always the husband or the boyfriend that's in denial in all these stories. And I guess there is some additional data to back that up here. Because when talking about ghosts or spirits specifically, I am correct here. Men are far less likely to believe. 48% for women and only 34% for men. A difference of 14 points.

Hey man, this is Sarah Jane.

This is about a place in New Jersey. It is a log cabin. It's very, very south. It's Cape May, you know, near exit zero on the parkway. When we first moved in there, I was like 10, maybe 7, I don't know. This is a log cabin that is well over 100 years old that was made by pretty much the first settlers in that area. So it's like ancient, I mean, for me, but it's not like an ancient artifact.

Yeah.

So my mother's new boyfriend would turn the bathroom lights off two or three times because I kept on, I don't know, spending too long in the bathroom, you know, to like do my makeup when I would visit. So he would just switch them off. And we have great electrics. My father was an electrician. You know, it wasn't faulty wiring. We even had a couple of electrics come in right before this happened.

The bathroom lights would just... They switched off, like, three times after. I mean, I was so angry, like, the third time that the bathroom lights switched off. I would go outside the bathroom in my towel, mind you, in front of, like, what I thought would be my stepdad, and nobody would be there. And I was like, this is just running away. I'm, like, done with it. So it's, like, the third time consecutively that I turned them all the way on. And then...

They turned back off. And I was so angry that I actually ran out just in my towel. And my mother and her boyfriend are sitting on the couch. And I was like, listen, you little beep, beep, beep, beep. Stop, like, beep. Turning out my beep lights. This is ridiculous. I was like, I know you thought you were funny the first, like, two times you did it. But, like, this is getting stupid.

My mother looked completely shocked at me. And she was just like, dude, he didn't go anywhere near the bathroom. We've been sitting here watching this movie for two hours. And I was like, oh. So not only had I cursed out someone that didn't do anything, but also I was a little spooked, to be honest with you.

The second thing is I was like 17 years old. It was my senior year in high school. So I'm laying in bed and I wasn't like falling asleep. I like had just laid down, you know, and I had heard a TV like 20 minutes ago. And my brother, he's like an insomniac just like me. Like we don't sleep at all. And he would spend like mad time in the living room. It was just in the middle of the night, you know.

And he did this, like, almost every night. He would go down and watch TV constantly. We both didn't sleep, so what else was there to do? I was kind of irritated because since it was my senior year in high school, I had, like, finals the next day. And this guy would just player the TV all the time. So I, like, sit up out of bed, and I'm just yelling at him, and I'm like, you f***, what the f*** is wrong with you? I have finals tomorrow. You're such a f***.

This is unbelievable. Lower it, man. And it wasn't that loud, to be honest. I slept right next to the living room downstairs and everybody else slept upstairs. We didn't get along that well when we were younger, needless to say. Then it got louder. And all of a sudden, like two news broadcasts that were going on together, like two people maybe interacting with each other over another pair of people interacting with each other.

And I'm already sitting up, you know, so I'm... And I was like, lower the volume. What the... is wrong with you? Do you not understand that I'm going to fail my finals because you're... It got louder. It got so loud that it was blaring. And mind you, I hadn't even fallen asleep at that point. I don't fall asleep because I'm an insomniac. I was like, do I have sleep paralysis? Am I hallucinating? What is happening here? But I didn't want to get out of bed. I'm lazy. So I yelled at him another time. And then...

It got even louder. It almost sounded like it was a mini concert going on in my house. Like he had put the volume up to max. And I was like, dude, I'm going to beat the shit out of this guy. I walked from my bed across the room and I was like, listen, if you don't turn that TV off, I'm going to. And I opened the latch and I opened the door. And as I was mid-sentence, everything in that living room was pitch black.

There was no TV on and there was no one there. There was nobody anywhere downstairs. And you can hear people. The stairs creak if you walk up and down them. There was no noise. There was nothing. It was just me alone in a pitch black living room. And I swear to God, I saw a light under the door as well.

And I slammed the door. I locked it. It's not really a lock, but I put a pencil through the hole because it's like, you know, 100 years old or whatever. And I just ran back to bed and I covered my head. And I was like 17, man. It was very embarrassing, but I was freaking terrified.

I didn't even sleep with the lights on. I just stayed up with the lights on, sitting upright, staring at my door. It was horrible. So anyway, last thing I have to say. I was visiting my mother's house, and this is like a year and a half ago. I was 28. I'm like old enough. It's not child's play anymore.

I visited her, and I stayed, like, a couple nights. The first night, I actually slept on the couch because I, like, absolutely hate the bedroom. I don't know why I hate the bedroom, but I hate the bedroom. Absolutely 110% is the creepiest place ever. The second night that I was there, I mean, she, like, made the room for me, you know what I mean, so I could stay as a guest. So I was like, it'd be kind of rude if she, like, did all this stuff for me.

And then, you know, I didn't stay there. So I fell asleep. And like, I had night terrors when I was like a kid, maybe up to 12. But like, I haven't had anything like that since then. This is the most terrified I've been after the age of like 20. I was sleeping and I actually felt something grabbing my legs and pulling me off of the bed.

Now, I would have chalked it up to sleep paralysis because I used to have that when I was younger. But I felt the hands and I started screaming like a little girl. I started screaming for my mom. She's downstairs and she has injured knees, so she's not supposed to be walking up and down those steps. But my mother actually ran upstairs because she hasn't heard me scream like that since I was a kid, you know?

When she came upstairs, I was off of the bed and I was on the floor and I was like completely hysterical. She told me this. I didn't even remember that I went on the floor because I was like, I guess, half asleep. I was like, something dragged me off the bed, something dragged me off the bed. I was like across the floor. Like I didn't just like hobble over there while I was unconscious. You know, the next day, I didn't tell her this because she already thinks the house is haunted. She's like totally psychotic with that s***.

I actually had little bruises around my ankles. They didn't go away for like two weeks. Like someone had literally grabbed me and dragged me off the bed. Anyway, listen, I'm just going to say I absolutely love your show. I guess later on and have a great evening. Bye bye. Holy s***. That's a lot of activity. Thank you, Sarah Jane, for telling us all about it. I'm getting yanked off the bed by a spirit. I think someone just called bingo.

Again, that's wild stuff, Jane, and we appreciate you telling us all about it. Nah, that's not it. This move is perfect. The quarter pounder with cheese had many great things. Maple flavored griddle cakes isn't one of them. McDonald's breakfast comes first. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. So I wouldn't have made that move, but... Now, what's worse than a ghost child?

Well, how about a whole bunch of ghost children? Annie from Parts Unknown, welcome to tonight's show.

Hi, Derek. My name is Annie. I am going to leave my state anonymous just because this is not my story and I want to protect some privacy. But essentially, I have a friend who growing up through a series of unique and somewhat unfortunate circumstances, ended up living in a home that was being remodeled.

But the home had previously belonged to a very prominent SLVF leader. So they were staying in this home while it was being remodeled. It was kind of a favor by the owner of the home. And a lot of the time she was left there with her siblings alone while her parents were dealing with some other things.

But she started telling me about a lot of really weird experiences that she had at this house.

If you guys don't know, FLDS or like polygamy, there's typically like one paternal figure and then there will be multiple wives and therefore lots and lots of children. And in this instance, it was not a healthy situation from what's been reported. I don't want to get too specific, but essentially she said that at night she and her siblings would hear voices

women sobbing through the halls of the house. It was a really large house. She said she and her sisters, even if they really had to use the restroom, they would just stay huddled in their bedroom all night because they could hear these women just sobbing. One particular time, as she turned a corner, she saw an apparition of a woman at the opposite end of the hallway sobbing.

turning a corner. She specifically talked about seeing this woman's dress flowing behind her and flowing around the corner as she walked away. If you know about polygamy, oftentimes they dress in like 1800s clothing. So she saw the back of this woman with her hair done and this old fashioned dress turning the corner.

Another time, she and I know at least one of her other siblings were out playing on a swing out on the edge of the property. And her siblings were like, okay, it's time to go in. She didn't want to go in. She's being stubborn. So her siblings were like, okay, fine, we'll leave you out here and good luck. And she said the second that she lost sight of her older siblings, she heard children crying.

All around her, they were playing, giggling, laughing. But she said it was just the most ominous thing ever. And she immediately rushed back to her older siblings. So I don't know if it was haunted. Part of me wonders if just because of the heaviness...

of things that had happened in that home that maybe there's just leftover energy there. She did say she went back as an adult and her husband, who is not superstitious at all, they pulled up and he immediately said, you need to go. It doesn't feel good here. Since then, the property has all been demolished and a housing development has been built on top of that.

And I would be so curious to know if these homes go over that have weird things happen. Anyway, that is my friend's story. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen. Love the podcast and we'll chat soon. Bye. Thanks, Annie. I too wonder if those homes are experiencing anything they can't quite explain. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if they did.

All the ingredients seemed to be there. And those ghostly women sobbing. Good lord, that's nightmare fuel. Could you imagine hearing something like that coming down the hall from your darkened bedroom at three o'clock in the morning? Well, thanks to Annie, we get to hear all about it without having to experience the terror ourselves. So thank you again, Annie, for making that phone call.

Now folks, believe it or not, I have several more stories to share with you here tonight. But before I dive back in, Sarah and I still haven't gotten around to shutting our merchandise shop down. So you get one more final last chance to take advantage of our 20% off sale. Get yourself a shirt or a poster or a hat, some stickers or a pen. You can get all kinds of stuff, frankly.

And for the next few days, you can get it all at 20% off. That's MonstersAmongUsPodcast.com and click that shop tab. Now next up, we work our way to Iowa. Please welcome the following anonymous caller.

Hi, Derek. This is Anonymous from Iowa. I wanted to tell you about the ghost that I used to see when I was little. When I was really little, my family lived in this 100-plus-year-old house in Woodward, Iowa, which is this little tiny town. And we lived right across the street from the funeral home. So my friends and I, we would go and look inside the funeral home and that kind of thing. But that's not really where this story takes place.

In my house, we had this big, big, kind of a half-spiral staircase. It made like one turn right at the center of it. When I was very little, my mom said that I used to play with a little girl that she couldn't see all the time. I would talk about her and the clothes that she was wearing, and it sounded like she was wearing old clothes. And one of my earliest memories is standing on that staircase and looking up

and seeing her just kind of floating. And now that I'm a little older and I kind of know what some things look like, sorry if this triggers anybody, but it looked like she was hanging from the staircase. And I was little, I was like four or five years old.

I didn't know what that kind of thing looked like at the time, so I don't know why I would have been imagining that if that were the case. But then there was one day when my sister and I went to my grandparents' house. They lived in West Des Moines at the time. I was quite a bit older at this point. I was maybe 10 years old, and I hadn't really had any experiences like that for a little while. But we were going down the stairs

I was in front, my sister was right behind me, and my grandma was behind her. And we were walking down to my grandmother's sewing room because we would always go down there and help her with quilting and that kind of thing. And we're walking down the stairs, and I look up, and I see dart across the hallway

Now the hallway wasn't very big. It was maybe four or five feet from wall to wall, so you could touch both walls if you stood in the center and put your arms out. But darting across the hallway, I saw a girl in a white dress, and she just ran from one wall to the other and disappeared.

And it looked like she went from inside of one room into another one, but there were no rooms. There were no doorways there. I screamed. I freaked out. And my sister and my grandmother didn't see anything. So they were very concerned. They had no idea why I was so upset all of a sudden. And I tried to tell them what I saw. They didn't exactly believe me.

I don't know if that's the same little girl, if she followed me, or if it was somebody else in that house. I just know what I saw all these years later. Thank you so much. Love the podcast. Bye-bye. Thank you, caller, for ringing in. That's the second call in a row featuring a 100-year-old home and our first little girl ghost of the evening. For those of you keeping score...

Yet another very popular trope. Now obviously the concept of a ghost is a very old one. But just how old are we talking here? Well Delaney was able to dig up an article that posits that an ancient Babylonian tablet, some 3500 years old, might be mankind's earliest depiction of a ghost. This from the Smithsonian Magazine article.

A tablet made in ancient Babylon around 1500 BCE may be the earliest known depiction of a ghost. The clay tablet is part of a guide to exercising ghosts held in the collections of the British Museum. The image on the tablet is only visible when viewed from above, under a light. The tablet is small enough to fit in a person's hand, and at least half of it is missing. But the object still holds carefully detailed instructions on getting rid of pesky ghosts.

The drawing was most likely made by a master craftsperson who was highly skilled in drawing in clay. According to the museum's director, the tablet depicts a male ghost being led back to the afterlife. Now, ancient Babylon was located in present-day Iraq, for those that don't know and might be curious, a place that's been inhabited by humans for a very, very long time.

Now, like I said, there's a link in the show notes if you'd like to lay eyes on paranormal history. Now, how about another story? Stephanie from Texas. Go ahead with your tale. Hi, this is Stephanie.

I remembered a story that my boyfriend had told me back when he was about maybe 14, 15. He was in the living room talking with his mother, just, I guess, about their day. And his little brother, I want to say he was probably like three at the time, he was playing with this little, like, toy car that you kind of have to push with your feet in order to get it to move.

And the little boy was a happy child. He was laughing and giggling while he was playing on this car. And all of a sudden, he sees in the corner of his eye, his little baby brother stopped in the middle of the hallway.

and just start screaming, just like inconsolable. And my boyfriend had no idea how to calm him down or what happened. Whenever he asked him what terrified him so much, he states that he saw this shadowy, elongated walk from his parents' bedroom across the hall

to my boyfriend's bedroom. It just completely terrified the kid. And...

This isn't the first time that something has been seen going into my boyfriend's room. There was a time where he had lived with his daughter's mother when she was pregnant. He lived with her for a couple of months, so his dad ended up spending time in that room whenever all the kids were sleeping in his mom's bed. His dad would sleep in my boyfriend's room, and he states that whenever he slept there, he felt this...

dark and ominous presence in that room. And he just felt so uncomfortable. And he spent the littlest time he could in that room because it just felt ominous and it felt haunted. And when I asked my boyfriend why he thinks stuff like this happens to him, he states that he had a tragic past and he feels like

All these things attract to him due to the constant negativity. And the reason my boyfriend doesn't actually call the show is because he states that these memories are so traumatic and he just tries to leave it as far behind in his past as he can. And I want to say that currently we're about 25 now. And this happened back when he was between the ages of seven till about 18.

I want to say thank goodness that it has not followed us into our home. He hasn't had anything like that or seen anything like that. Thank goodness. I hope you guys enjoy my stories. Thanks. Thank you, Stephanie. Now, I can't say that I blame him, but some distance between yourself and whatever the hell that thing was. You certainly can't blame anyone for wanting to or even trying to accomplish that. Well, either way, we thank you again, Stephanie.

for preserving his tale. Now if you would, please meet me back in Texas, where Mary is waiting with an entry. And by the way, this call briefly mentions murder and gun violence.

A warning, just in case. Hi, my name is Mary and I'm from South Texas. And I was calling about an incident that happened to me. I was 11 years old and it was in the summer of 97. We lived in a huge, old, stout home. The property next to us belonged to my grandmother, so there was two additional homes and then her house. Across the street from them was an aunt, so it was like, you know, a lot of family in the area. Yeah.

The summer before, I had an uncle who was murdered not that far away from the area we lived in. And we were actually outside in Kirk, the gunshots that killed him, unfortunately. In the summer of 97, my mom was having a really hard time with it. And she was also having a really hard time at work with the lady there. So that summer, we started to have incidents inside of the house.

The very first thing that happened to us was the home had tons of rooms. All the rooms had doors. It's like 100 degrees outside, so every room has an air conditioner.

We were having a family night. We were watching a movie, and my father was sitting in a chair next to the door. The rest of us were kind of just laid out on the floor. It's myself, and I had three other sisters, and then my mom and dad. You know, everyone was just relaxing, watching a movie. And the door had one of those old brass handles on it. And so all we heard was kind of like a ruckus. We turned around, and my dad was standing up.

And the next thing we know, he hits the floor and he's looking underneath the door. There's a long hallway right outside the door. The light was on. So I guess he could see feet underneath the door. My mom gets up really quickly and she's asking him what's going on. His thought immediately was, it's your brothers. They're kind of pranksters. That's where his mind immediately went. He started to move around on the floor to look at different angles, but he couldn't see any feet.

While he's down there, the doorknob actually starts to turn. He gets up extremely quickly and he panics. So he starts to move towards the door. The door, there's no breath handle, but in order to lock it, you need to put the key in to lock it from either side. So they put latches on all of the doors in the house. So he puts the latch on, he gets back down onto the floor to look. At this point, my mom's standing at the door and the handle begins to rattle.

It's swinging left and right, back and forth, and then it starts to pull.

We were freaking out. It's a bunch of girls. We started panicking. My older sister kind of comes down and just tells us, you know, it's our uncles. They're just playing around. To this day, we don't talk about it. It's just something that it happened and kind of everybody kind of moved on from it. But the entire door at one point was shaking. My dad ended up crawling out of a window and going around to the backside of the house. In his mind, it was them. The entire house was closed up. He couldn't get back into the house.

But then he came back around and stopped at that point when he got the gun and went into the house. He did an entire sweep of the home. There was nothing.

This went on throughout the entire summer. We ended up having to get somebody to come into the home and help us clean it out. It got progressively worse. This next incident that happened, happened with my smaller sister and myself. We were in the house, my parents were there, and my two older sisters were meeting with an aunt to go shopping. And we were waiting for them to go so we could go into their room to play with their makeup and stuff. We kept looking out the driveway to make sure they were gone.

So once we actually saw the car pull out and leave, we took the makeup and stuff out. We used to have a wraparound porch, started in the front, came all the way down to the side, and there wasn't stairs. So we heard the rocks outside, and then we heard the steps on the cement. So we thought they were coming back. Looked out the window really quick, the old Venetian blinds. It was around dusk.

I didn't see anything. I heard it again. My smaller sister looked out and she looked down the driveway and she said, there's a man. I went to the window immediately and there was a man standing there staring out into the street. He was wearing denim jeans, a western style t-shirt and hat. And I didn't know who he was. I'd never seen this man before. I started to walk backwards into the driveway.

At this point, you know, my sister's already out the door. She's knocking on my parents' door. And my father comes out and she's like, there's a man in the driveway. My dad comes into the room we're in, kind of scolds us for going through our sister's stuff, looks out the window and doesn't see anything. So he walks back into his room. I go back to look out the window and

This man is turned around walking into the driveway. I yell at him again. He comes out, and at this point, he actually sees somebody walking

I'm assuming it was just a giggle into someone turning the corner into the yard after there's a fence. So he runs to the backyard and locks the door and we're following him. And he's yelling at us to stay inside. And he walks all around the back. We had two Rottweilers that were back there. They were silent. They barked at everything. They were silent. They were just laying there. He walked all the way into the street. Didn't see anything.

We thought nothing of it.

We're like, no, we're fine. He tells us to get out of the room we're in. So we grab a few things and we go back into our room. We have an old style vanity with a mirror. And my sister had really, really long hair. So she was brushing it out and she was playing with the makeup and stuff. And I was sitting on the bed. And I hear something false. I look over to her and she's white. We're Hispanic. We're not white. So her skin tone turned colors. It turned white.

She starts crying and screaming. And my dad comes back into the room, and he's at this point just upset because he thinks we're being silly. And she's crying heavily, and they're like, what did you do to her? Did you hit her? Were y'all wrestling again? I didn't know what to say. I don't know what she saw at that point. I had no idea what was going on. My mom comes into the room. They're trying to calm her down and talk to her. And she just says, the man. They're like, what man? The man that was outside.

And this takes a good few minutes to get just this little bit of information out of her. So she finally calms down enough for her to actually talk. She said she was brushing her hair. And when she looked up, she saw something behind her. She turned around and the same thing turned around again. And there was a man sitting on the bed staring at her. And that's when she dropped the brush and just kind of freaked out. So they really just kind of calmed her down and, you know, kind of told her what her imagination, that kind of stuff. But she described what it looked like.

Thank you, Mary. Now, who or what was that mystery man? And the door, could that have been the brother? Coming back to make contact and to have all of this happen to your family, Mary, not just you, awfully incredible. And allow me to add that I'm incredibly sorry for your loss.

But we can't thank you enough, Mary, for taking the time to share. Everybody, be sure to mark family hauntings off your bingo card. And since this next one is our final call of the evening, this would be your last opportunity to claim bingo. So you best pay attention to Rachel's call out of the state of Pennsylvania. Oh, and same morning for this one as well. This call contains a brief mention of murder and gun violence as well.

Hey, Derek. My name is Rachel, and I live in Pennsylvania, kind of deep in the woods, like well deep in the boonies kind of Pennsylvania. This story takes place back when I was seven years old, and we lived in this house with a lot of woods in the back. You know, when you're a little kid, everything seems a lot bigger and a lot scarier, and you seem to be sort of more hypersensitive to things when you're younger, right? Yeah.

So I had this run-in with this thing in the hallway one night. I heard its footsteps, and I stood up, and I looked in the hallway, and there was this big shape, this black shape in the hallway.

I don't know if it was because I was asleep or if I was awake. I had horrible nightmares, I remember. Around that time, I was just plagued with these horrible nightmares all the time. They were so bad that I couldn't pay attention in school. I remember people were like, are you sleeping okay? I'd just tell them no. In every single one of the nightmares,

There would be this old man in the drains, and my family would hear footsteps at night, mainly, in this staircase. As soon as we left the house, the nightmare stopped. Years later, I found out that there was an old man that had lived in the house before us, and his son had killed him, had shot him,

In my bedroom, over a money dispute. So I might have seen that old man hanging around this ghost. But anyway, thank you for listening. This is my submission. Thank you very much. An old man ghost that gives you nightmares. What a way to end the show. Thank you, Rachel, for calling in.

And you know if TV and movies have taught me anything, Rachel. It's that this old man ghost might have been trying to tell you where he stashed some cash. After all, she did say he was killed over a money dispute. Stranger things have happened, they say. Regardless, it might be worth a look. There could be a bundle of money under your floorboards. But either way, it was a great entry and the perfect way to close us out here this evening.

Monsters Among Us is written and produced by me, Derek Hayes. Copyright Red Crow Media. Additional support is provided by Sarah Carter Hayes, Delaney Bowers, and Connor Ryan. All media used in this production is done so under the protection of fair use. Be sure to follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. We have a Discord server you can find on Patreon. And of course, don't forget about our YouTube channel.

Now, if you have an opportunity, please leave us a rate and review wherever that sort of thing is possible. They tell us that it helps the show grow, but I have my suspicions. Now, remember, you can catch the show every Saturday evening at 11 p.m. Eastern on the Unexed Digital Network. Just visit unexednetwork.com to learn more. And finally, tonight's score was provided by Iron Cthulhu, Apocalypse, Co.agmusic, and Carl Casey at White Bad Audio.

Don't forget about our film Shadows in the Desert High Strangeness in the Borrego Triangle. Visit borregotriangle.com to find out how you can tune in. And international folks, I am very, very sorry. I'm doing all that I can to get the film delivered out to you. But the folks in charge are simply not cooperating. But I'm working on something that should at least allow you to tune in once. And I'll circle back to that here in a couple of weeks. Oh, and one last thing. Don't forget that you can get additional content...

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I'm off to get started on Thursday's installment, and I'd better see you there. But until then, keep it spooky, and have yourselves a good night.