Halloween Special: Ghost Stories of Maine and New England
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This is Murder, She Told, and I'm Kristen Sevey, and this episode is going to be a little bit different than anything I've ever done. So if you're used to tuning in and having me dive right in at the top of the episode, this episode isn't going to do that.

But it's Halloween, it's October, and if you're like me, I've always been fascinated by Halloween, so I thought that I would do something fun for the Halloween weekend. I remember as far back as kindergarten just loving Halloween. And then I discovered replays of Unsolved Mysteries on TV, maybe around second grade. Also Are You Afraid of the Dark, I was a huge fan of that show and the rest is history, but

I loved the ghost episodes of Unsolved Mysteries. My cousin and I would sit and watch the previews of the episode at the top, and we would just hope that it was a good one. And by good one, it meant that there was a ghost story in it.

There was actually one that scared me a lot. It was the story of a little girl seeing a shadow man, and one day she's taking a nap, and next to her on the bed, there's an imprint of a person laying there beside her. After seeing that episode, I had to put all my stuffed animals on the bed beside me so that a ghost could not lay down next to me.

So the idea for this episode actually came from a listener, Jesse. A little over a month ago, I got a story in my inbox titled, How I Got Into True Crime, and it was a personal story. And if you've listened to any other episodes, you know that I don't talk at all. I dive right in at the top, so there's not really much room for anything extra unless it's in the credits. But I read it, and I liked it.

So I thought maybe it would be fun to do an episode of listener stories. And I love My Favorite Murder's hometown stories, and I obviously love ghost stories. So thank you, Jessie, for sending me your story and inspiring this episode and to everyone who sent in theirs. So to kick off the first Murder, She Told listener episode, I'm going to read Jessie's story.

When I was seven, my aunt was almost murdered after coming home from going out to a Chinese buffet with my mom. There was a crazy snowstorm, and on her way home from dropping off my mom, my aunt saw someone stuck on the side of the road and stopped to see if they needed help. Surprisingly, it turned out to be her most recent ex, who we'll call John, and was actually on his way to her house to return a gun he'd borrowed from my grandpa.

My aunt took John to her house so he could call AAA. She went in the other room and John suddenly heard a commotion, so he went in to see what was happening and walked in to see my aunt being held by the hair with a knife to her throat by another ex. John used my grandpa's gun and shot the guy, saving my aunt's life. I remember getting up early to watch it with my mom on the 6am news.

The wildest part was that my aunt's fortune cookie that night said, an old friend will help you in a time of need. Jesse said that story took place in the Finger Lakes in New York, which I've been to and I absolutely love it there. So thank you for sending that in. This story was sent in by Zoe.

When I was five, we remodeled my house since my parents were finally having a boy and realized that four kids, three girls and one boy, in one bedroom was too much.

Remodeling meant we got all our own rooms, which, as a kid, was the most exciting thing in the world. I, as the oldest, got the biggest bedroom after my parents, which was even more exciting because I felt all grown up and special. Way to inflate my already big five-year-old ego, mom and dad. Our home was originally built in the 60s, after the top of the street where I live was created by clearing trees.

I believe only a few families lived there before us, so I'm still not sure if anyone died there. One night when I was about six or seven, my parents decided that we were all going out for dinner. I excitedly ran to my room, sat down in the corner where my closet meets the wall, and started pulling on my sneakers. All of a sudden, a dark male presence appeared and leaned over me.

I remember feeling really scared. Then, I felt like I was being choked. I couldn't breathe or scream. Silent tears streamed down my cheeks, and that's all I really remember. I never told my parents.

About four years ago, while on a car trip home from a family holiday, I was telling my mom about how I think I need therapy and somehow this incident came up. She was completely horrified and asked me to repeat the story again and again. I also remembered that I occasionally felt him watching me as I slept.

The next day, she bought sage and cleansed the house. While doing so, she began telling me that while getting our first alarm system installed when they first moved in, the guy who set it up claimed to be somewhat sensitive to spirits and said that there was an old woman who was present in the house.

My mom, the stubborn 20-something she was, laughed it off and didn't take it seriously. But when the shower curtains began to move without either her or my dad touching them, she flipped. She very loudly asked her to stop, and the curtains never moved again. I never had any other feelings or encounters before we remodeled, but my grandmother claims he attacked me because I could sense him.

As for the old woman, maybe she died in my house. I have absolutely no idea. I just know that she was a bitch for not stopping the shadow man from choking me. Thank you, Zoe, for sending that in. I don't normally use language on the show unless it's absolutely necessary, but I thought that last line was really funny and I knew I had to keep it in. So just an FYI, there is some language in some of the stories today, but I wanted to keep them in.

So this story is from Austin T. I was stationed on the USS Enterprise after it came home from its final deployment in November 2012. After about five months on the ship, I was standing watch down in one of the nuclear reactor plants. It was around 2 a.m. and I was the only one in my area.

I was logging some gauges on the middle level of the reactor room with a level above me and below me. I heard the door to the level above me open and I assumed it was the watch supervisor coming to check my logs. I heard the footsteps above me moving towards the stairs down to the middle level where I was. The back of the stairwell shook as the footsteps got closer. I moved around to meet them but nobody was there.

I looked up the stairs to see if they had gone back up to the top when I heard footsteps continue down the stairs to the lower level, which was directly behind and under the stairs I was standing in front of.

That was my cue to leave, and I hightailed my ass to the operating station to hide with the only other two people in the plant. I have no idea what passed me there, but when I asked a few people about it, a couple people had had similar experiences in different parts of the ship. The Enterprise was definitely haunted after its 51 years of service.

I think a lot of ships are haunted. I remember there being an Unsolved Mysteries episode about, I think it was the Queen Elizabeth or the Queen Mary, and that was definitely haunted too. Thank you, Austin, for your service and for setting that in. This is a story from Central Maine from someone who wishes to remain anonymous. My wife and I bought a farmhouse in Central Maine. The house was built in the 1860s and was quite dated when we initially purchased it.

It was the stereotypical bargain house that needed some serious TLC, and we were more than willing to put in the work.

I would like to preface this by saying that before we bought the house, neither my wife or I were believers in the paranormal, and we were fairly dismissive on the subject. For the first year, we renovated the bedrooms and lived in the house without incident. But during year two, we began a massive living room overhaul that took multiple months, and it was during that time that we had our first encounter.

At the time, my mother-in-law, who you might describe as a realist who also doesn't believe in ghosts, was living with us and stayed in the upstairs guest room. She's a night owl who would sporadically come downstairs to grab a snack or have a smoke break outside in the night.

One night in the middle of a cold Maine winter, she came downstairs for a smoke, and as she approached the front door, she noticed a man standing on the porch on the other side. He appeared to be in his late 50s or early 60s, and was roughly 6 feet tall. She wasn't able to get an adequate description other than the top half of his outfit, a flannel jacket, and a Mad Bomber-style hat that protected his ears.

She said that he was attempting to open the door, and it sounded like he was jiggling his keys into the lock. There was a street lamp in the distance that provided a little light and made the front door visible at all times of the night, so she had a fairly good view of the man on the porch. She initially stated that she thought it was a living, breathing man, and at 1am she was so afraid she let out an instinctual scream that woke up both me and my wife.

She said it couldn't have been any more than five or six seconds that she saw the man, and he simply faded into the night when she screamed. She emphasized that he didn't startle or run away. He had vanished in front of her.

By the time we came downstairs, she was hysterical. She said that she saw this man clear as day. She also stated that he didn't seem ominous or malicious. She later thought that she'd witnessed a man from the past coming home after getting off work.

The next incident occurred later that year at a birthday party. My entire family was there watching football in the living room when we witnessed the basement door open entirely by itself. The doorknob turned and the door swung open. From then on, we had a period of paranormal silence. Until a few months ago. One night I woke up to use the bathroom, but I had to go downstairs and through a very dark house to get to it.

As I returned to go back upstairs, I had to pass the living room and was greeted by the glow of a television, which was off when I passed it the first time. I immediately wrote it off as nothing. The living room TV has a screensaver and would automatically shut off after a few minutes of inactivity. When I got back to the bedroom, I was surprised to see my wife awake, fumbling to find the remote, because the bedroom TV, which sits on a dresser across the room,

had turned on by itself at the same time. The remote sat next to it. Ironically, a few nights ago, while my wife and I were lying in bed, getting ready to call it a night, we heard three very clear, distinctive knocks at the front door. When I got up to answer the door, nobody was there.

This could be easily dismissed as somebody pranking us if not for the fact that we set up a ring security system in hopes of capturing our previous ghostly guest. After reviewing the footage, we found absolutely nothing caught on camera.

None of the activity we've experienced feels malicious and our house has a warm vibe. We've put tons of hard work into making it our dream home and have come to the conclusion that the previous owners of the home appreciate the love we have for it and they just like to let us know that they are here with us too.

So my parents built the house that I grew up in in Newport, and I never experienced anything paranormal here, much to my chagrin, but I've definitely experienced paranormal activity at a house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and then when I worked in Sleepy Hollow in New York. But that's a story for another time. This next story was sent in by Druby of the Misery Machine podcast.

Being a sheltered kid with a helicopter mom made me do some pretty wild things once I turned 18. When I wasn't busy challenging my fear of heights by climbing buildings, I was exploring another questionably legal practice, urban exploring. I had no interest in breaking into places that people considered home or were any extent of a business venture they were in. I specifically wanted to explore buildings that were abandoned long before I was even born.

I have an interest in old things. There's nothing like going to an antique store and holding something in my hand that's older than myself and envisioning what life was like back then. I like to wonder who the person was that first received this thing decades ago, what life was like for them, or depending on the item, what it meant to them.

Being inside an old building was like admiring an antique object, except instead of holding it in the palm of your hand, it was essentially holding you in the palm of its hand. There were plenty of these old buildings in rural Maine, if you knew where to look, and with little else to do in a place like this, my friends and I spent a lot of time driving around scoping places out.

This story takes place in the town of Green, a small town directly adjacent to the city of Lewiston. Like any small town, there are certain things that are only visible to those of us who grew up here, and information passed down through previous generations in the form of legends.

You start to become numb to these legends growing up, thinking they purely exist for old people to scare kids away. After hearing stories about people who went insane or areas we shouldn't go because there was once a ritualistic slaughter of animals done by a cult of Satan worshippers,

I was numb. And so it was no surprise that when I told my best friend Chad that I was looking to break into this forgotten small shack of a house across from the Green Post office, I was numb to anything he had to tell me. Normally he was encouraging, interested, or right there by my side for my crazy ideas. Hell, we even climbed the outside of a seven-story building together. Seriously.

That day, when I told him my idea, his tone changed in a way that was completely different from anything I had ever pitched him in the past. This place in question, left forgotten for decades, was apparently home to an old and destitute woman, purposefully left to rot by her children. She rarely got any visitors, and never was she seen by her kids.

According to Chad's dad, this apparently left her a bitter and resentful woman in her old age. He told me how his dad said he and others in town used to bring her meals on Thanksgiving and Christmas. She would spend every major holiday alone. She died there alone. There, her house sat for decades. Chad concluded his story to me with, Some things you just don't mess with. I wasn't deterred.

Since this was directly next to Route 202, it still had decent traffic, even at night, especially by the state police. So I had two of my friends staked out by the post office near the road with a walkie-talkie. It was 2 a.m. on a Saturday that I stood in front of this small foreboding shack of a house. The thought of somebody living here was impossible for me to comprehend.

The only person with me was my then-girlfriend at the time, who was equally enthusiastic about entering this place with me.

The windows were tiny and affixed in the house, and I wasn't looking to break glass unless I absolutely had to. I always felt guilty about breaking windows and avoided doing so unless the window was already broken, which is ironic because I didn't feel guilty about the option I settled with, slamming the bottom of my boot just to the right of the doorknob. I'm not a big person, and this was my first time kicking a door in.

Normally, when going into an abandoned house, there is an entrance already cleared for you by the previous explorer, so you don't have to resort to something like this. The fact that the door wasn't already open should have clued me in on something.

Three kicks later, the latch released, but the door was still stuck in the frame, so it took a bit of effort to push open. Given where the house sat away from the road, it was hard to make out what was in there exactly. I pulled my flashlight and crossed the threshold with my girlfriend right behind me. Then, suddenly, I no longer needed my flashlight. Everything became clear.

visible. However, my vision was changed, as I now saw the world in a sepia tone. The expected sights of overturned furniture and broken glass were not present. Instead, what was there was an immaculate dining and living room combo out of the 50s. The table was neatly set with silverware for dinner. I could smell the familiar smell of Thanksgiving turkey. I felt nobody around me.

I was alone in this. I didn't have much time to process what I saw as this overwhelming sense of dread descended on me. I felt it squeezing the pit of my stomach. Something very dark was in here with me. Ahead of me was a hallway that was pitch black, a stark contrast from the illuminated room around me.

But I didn't need my eyes to know what was there, and its presence was causing a violent rhythmic pulse inside my body. I reached out behind and around me and I couldn't feel my girlfriend. The pain in my stomach was getting unbearable, and in that moment I believed I was about to die, and my soul would be trapped in this place, eternally tortured by some otherworldly being.

I turned, shut my eyes, and threw myself towards the entrance. I landed in wet grass. I heard someone else breathing heavily near me. I heard the sounds of sneakers rapidly smacking against the tar. I started dry heaving.

I was back in front of the house and my two lookout friends were checking on why I loudly threw myself onto the ground. Laying next to me was my girlfriend. Immediately disbelieving what I'd experienced, I asked her what she saw in there and she relayed to me the exact scenario I had just experienced.

I never quite understood what it was that happened to me. Nowadays, with lack of a better explanation, I describe it as a forced hallucination. Whatever was in there made me see, smell, and feel the things that I did. We quickly pulled the door back into its place the best we could and departed.

I remember sitting at my friend's house, unable to shake the feeling from that night. It took days before I didn't feel the mark this left on me during every moment of my waking life. I never entered an abandoned building again after that. Some things you just don't mess with. If you've checked out the Instagram, you probably know that I am also a fan of vintage stuff, so I thought this story was particularly cool. If not, you can find me on Instagram at MurderSheToldPodcast.

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She always had a thing for me even though she ended up marrying someone else, so I always kept her at an arm's length. She died recently of complications from cancer, and I happened to be acquainted with her sister, Colleen, and we started dating long distance. Colleen lives in San Francisco, and I'm in New Hampshire. But soon after we started dating, strange things started happening.

First, doors started slamming in the middle of the night at both our places. Then, one night, I was on the phone with Colleen and the temperature fell in the room 20 degrees, in the middle of a hot summer night.

One night when my boys were here, I was upstairs talking on the phone with her and both boys came into the bedroom to tell me that there was a distinct knock at the door but nobody was there. It happened a second time, but this time the knock was on my window, two stories up. Later that week, I broke a mug and put it in the wastebasket. In the middle of the night, I heard rustling downstairs and the next morning, my mug was sitting on the floor.

That same night, all of Colleen's stainless steel spoons and knives were bent.

But I think the creepiest thing was when I was in my living room and I heard my office phone turn on the speaker function. It kept dialing a 716 area code number. 716 is the area code in Buffalo where Daisy and Colleen grew up. When I checked with Colleen, that was the number of a local restaurant where both of them worked in high school. Many people are haunted by their ex, but not quite like this.

Thank you, Phil, for sending that in. So this is an international story that's set in Belgium, and it's from Sophie. So it was the mid-90s, and we had just moved to Belgium. And while our house was getting renovated, we stayed at this rental property on a farm. The owners were Dutch, which my dad liked because he's also Dutch. We were staying in their guest house while they stayed in the main house, all on the same property.

My dad used to travel a lot for work, and my mom would be alone with just me and my older sister. At the time, I must have been about five or six years old.

One night while my dad was gone, my mom woke up around 3 a.m. to the sound of someone chopping wood outside. She got up and went to look outside the window and saw what looked like a mix of a monk and the Grim Reaper floating above the ground staring directly at my mother. It didn't have a face.

My mom was American-Italian, raised Roman Catholic, and she had an immediate gut reaction to go to the room where my sister and I were in and sat in the corner reciting prayers until the sun came up while we slept.

The next day, she looked out the window and saw a huge puddle of water in the same spot she saw the reaper floating in the dark, despite the fact that it hadn't rained at all that night. After my mom dropped us off at school, she went back to the farm and started to do some laundry in the main house where the Dutch family lived. The woman who owned the house saw my mom and asked her how everything was.

Well, something strange happened early this morning that was a bit startling. My mom didn't really believe in ghosts and thought that she would think she was crazy, but the owner insisted, so she told her what she saw outside the window the night before.

The owner took a deep breath and went on to tell my mom that the property has a rich history. It's the spot where many soldiers died during the Napoleon War, and later there was another incident involving the previous owners. Two brothers who lived on the farm before she did were brutally murdered. Her own children had to go get psychiatric help for seeing so many spirits on the property.

As soon as my mom heard this, she packed up all our suitcases and left. I remember being picked up from school and all our stuff was in the car. We ended up staying at a hotel. My mom later went to the church and spoke to the priest about what she saw. The priest asked her, do you believe in the Holy Spirit? And my mom said, well, yes, father, I do. And then he looked at her dead in the eye and said, then why wouldn't you believe in the unholy spirit?

Ooh, that last line. I love it. So this is our final story, and this actually inspired something else that connects to my hometown. So this is from Tracy, and if you went to the University of Maine, especially the Orono campus, you'll probably know exactly where I'm talking about. Back when I used to work at Wells Commons on the UMO campus, I had an experience. I was in high school and working in the kitchens as a dishwasher.

After working there for about a year, they trusted me enough to let me close if I was still cleaning pans. One night, that was the case. So imagine this layout. A 30 by 30 foot square, but in the middle of the square is a closed off pantry, and hallways run around the entire outside of the pantry with several points coming off this hallway.

I punched out at the time clock, yep, I'm that old, and walked around to the complete opposite side of the building, shutting off all the lights along the way and making sure doors were locked to exit out the back door. When I got outside and turned around to lock the back door behind me, I noticed the lights on the opposite end were reflecting down the hallway, the lights by the time clock. Tired, I shrugged and walked back, of course turning on every light along the way.

On my way back out, I turned off all the lights again and got to the back door when I noticed again that the light by the time clock was on. I yelled down the hallway, Hey, okay, funny, Matt. No response. Weird, but okay.

I yelled a few more choice words with no response. So then I went around the entire basement, checking the locked doors, searching the bathrooms, etc. Nothing. No one was there. I once again turned off the lights, and when I reached the back door for the third time, turned around and the light at the back was on again. This time I heard footsteps echoing in that area. I was furious at this point.

Suddenly, the lights down the hallway to my right turned on, and I was about to ream someone out. The footsteps came closer to the point where I should be able to see the person coming toward me. I looked around the corner, and nobody was there. The hallway was completely empty, but I could still hear the footsteps advancing towards me at the same steady gait. I locked the door and ended up leaving the lights on.

The next day, I asked one of the chefs if anything weird had ever happened to them. His response? Oh, so you met the ghost last night. He likes to prank people. Every New Year's Eve, we send a bottle of champagne up the dumbwaiter, and it always comes back down empty. Just ignore him. It took me a while before I ignored him.

The next summer, while still working at the Commons, I was living on campus in one of the buildings, Penobscot Hall. The laundry room was in the basement, of course.

The lights were always on, so nothing ever felt ominous. It just had that creepy basement feel. One day, as I entered the long hallway that ran along the basement center towards the laundry room, I had a feeling of intensity. Hatred isn't quite right, just malevolence toward me. I didn't know how I knew, but I just had a feeling like something wanted to harm me.

It was coming from a dark corner at the end of the hall behind me, so I picked up the pace and immediately felt the intensity increase. I felt as though whatever it was was getting closer.

At this point in my life, I had never watched a horror movie of any kind, and I didn't know the cliches. But as the feeling intensified, I ran past the laundry room, threw down my basket, and continued to the other end of the hall, through the door, and up to the first landing outside. I saw nothing through the window in the door but blackness as I looked back. The feeling that was directed at me pervaded.

but I didn't feel it come any closer. I went back down with some friends later and didn't tell them why, just said that my laundry was ready, and just shrugged it off when it was sitting on the floor in the basket. The feeling never returned, although I often waited for it to. I never knew what it was, and I never saw it. I never wanted to. However, I read this recently, and it freaked me out again.

So Tracy sent me a link along with this story from the University of Maine library, and it's a PDF of a folklore collection from a senior student named Nola Johnson. It was originally printed with a typewriter in 1967.

I read through some of it, and it appears that Nola put together a collection for a class and said that she was one of the few students on campus who believed in ghosts. The document includes stories from interviews with students sharing folklore and ghost stories from the entire University of Maine system. There were a few stories of ghosts in Penobscot Hall. Here's an example. The White Lady of Penobscot Hall.

When Penobscot Hall was being built, a workman fell and met his death because of the carelessness of another workman. When the dead man's wife died, she swore she would always haunt the place of his death.

The first year that the dorm was ready for occupancy, two girls in a room on first floor east woke up during the night and saw a whitish, translucent figure in the center of the room. They were very frightened, but the figure disappeared, and they eventually went back to sleep. The next morning, everything on their bureaus was turned upside down.

I think part of the reason for this collection is to also compare different variations of stories because there's a couple about this Penobscot ghost. Here's one more about Penobscot Hall. About five years ago, the janitor was fixing the light fixture in Penobscot Hall. He had a heart attack, fell off the ladder, and died. His dead wife's ghost keeps coming back to look for him. I don't know if anyone's ever seen her, but one year when two girls were studying in their room at night,

The curtains and their towels started to wave back and forth for no explainable reason. The doors and windows were closed. There is one story that caught my eye from this collection, and it doesn't take place on UMaine campus. It was titled The Dwellers, as told by Anne Witham on November 5th, 1966. It reads...

Right behind my house, maybe a couple of houses down, there's a house where the dwellers live. Well, she still lives there. They met strictly through a lonely hearts club. They corresponded for a long time, and finally she came up to Maine and they got married. The marriage never really worked out, but they stayed together anyway. When he started getting older, he got very senile and was a burden on her. He used to drive downtown and forget the way home.

or drive downtown and walk back forgetting his car. Sometimes when they were together, she had to give him directions because he forgot how to get downtown, and in Newport, that's not easy to forget. One day, about 20 years ago, she reported him missing. She said he went out and never came back. They searched the whole town, in the woods, and even dragged the river, and never found a body or anything.

Everyone believes that she did away with him. It's a spooky old house and everyone goes out of their way to avoid it. She never goes anywhere anymore. The funny thing is she still washes all of his old clothes and hangs them out on the line. I'm dying to go over and investigate, but I'm afraid she'll do away with me too.

So I grew up in Newport, and I have no idea which house she's talking about, I've never heard anything like this story, but I'm gonna leave you with this. What caught my attention about this story, other than the fact it takes place in my hometown, was the name Dweller. Because there's a missing man from Newport with very little details available in his case, and his name is Delbert Dwelley.

Delbert Dwelley was 74 years old when he went missing after he left his home on Lake Avenue in Newport for a walk on August 6th, 1961. Despite searching in the nearby Sebastakook River and the railroad tracks, he was never seen again.

It's possible he got lost in the woods after going too far, or got hit by a train somewhere along the tracks. There's a stone at the cemetery that states 1968 as his death, but the grave remains empty.

So that story that Anne wrote was from 1966, and she said that the woman reported her husband missing 20 years ago. So the timeline doesn't quite line up because Delbert went missing in 1961, but the story sounds so similar, and now I'm dying to find out which house this is. So stay tuned. I'm going to figure it out.

So that is the end of the first Murder, She Told listener episode. And I still have more stories left over. So if you liked this and you want more episodes like this, let me know. Also, if you have stories, feel free to send them over because you never know what it might inspire. If you are loving this show, it would make me so happy if you took a moment to leave a nice review on Apple or if you shared it with a friend.

Word of mouth is such an important element to keeping this show going, and so aren't reviews. If you aren't on Apple, there's other ways to do that, and in fact, I would love to send you a sticker if you would take a moment to leave a review. I'll put a link in the show notes to a Google Sheet so that you can get one.

And thank you for sharing these stories that I cover. My heart gravitates towards the unsolved and sharing these stories is such a great way to help families in need of answers. There's a blog attached to every episode linked in the show notes with photos and an embedded player. And it's just a really easy way to share these stories.

Thank you so much for your emails. I read every single message that gets sent to me. I've always loved mail, so please feel free to reach out anytime. I hope you have a safe and happy Halloween. And as always, thank you for listening.