From the Shadows

The Haunting Followed Them

2009-12-03T13:04:00.000-06:00

Something was wrong with the house.

Angie Kelly of New Cumberland, Pa., and her family moved into the large Foursquare that sat over a large series of caves in the 1990s.

“There was a hole in the back yard that lead down to the caves,” Kelly said. “We kept a board over the opening so kids and dogs wouldn’t fall in.”

But the Kelly family had more to worry about than cave openings.

“Being in the basement doing laundry, I never felt like I was completely alone,” Kelly said. “It was a strange feeling, like someone was watching me.”

Whatever was watching Kelly may have been watching her toddler, too.

“My son, Ryan, was also exhibiting very strange behavior,” Kelly said.

Ryan began slamming himself against the safety rails on his bed and tried to throw himself through the house’s large front window.

“At one point (he) attempted to throw himself down the stairs,” she said. “This was a frightening thought.”

Then things started happening in Ryan’s room.

“A horrible odor filled my son’s room, and just his room,” Kelly said. “Before too long, his room was overrun with flies. They were all over the windows, ala ‘Amityville Horror.’”

Kelly couldn’t get rid of the smell or the flies.

“They seemed to have no desire to leave his room,” she said. “The odor seemed to emanate from his closet and I had to remove his clothes so they wouldn’t stink.”

Finally, Kelly turned to religion.

“We never did figure out what the smell and the flies were all about, but after hanging a cross in his room, the smell left and the flies disappeared,” Kelly said.

The Kellys finally moved away from whatever lurked in that house.

“The house also got hit by lightning while I was living there,” Kelly said. “It was a very weird year that I lived there, just one strange thing after another. It was kind of a relief to move out. The entire experience in that house was very bizarre.”

But whatever was in the house may have followed them.

“In the mid-1990s, I lived in a rented duplex,” she said. “It was probably built in the 1920s. On various occasions, I would see a dark man that came down my stairway, take a left turn and head for my kitchen.”

That’s all the dark man, a walking shadow, would do; walk down the stairs and take a left turn.

“That didn’t bother me much until one night I awoke to the screaming of my young son,” she said. Ryan was now about four or five years old.

She ran to his bedroom and asked what was wrong.

“He was sitting up in bed, hysterical, and said, ‘Please make them go away,’” she said.

“Who?” Kelly asked.

“All of these people,” Ryan screamed.

Kelly couldn’t see anyone in the room, but she believed her son did.

“All I know is that he was absolutely hysterical and the incident frightened me for a very long time,” she said. “Was his room a portal? Could be.”

They eventually moved from the house and it sat vacant.

“Recently this same house was put on the market for sale,” she said. “It sat for a long, long time, the price dropping and dropping. It finally sold, but after many months on the market. I am convinced the reason the house sat so long for sale is that people know it is haunted.”

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Woman Had Black Eyes

2009-11-24T08:58:00.000-06:00

Leanne Smith couldn’t explain her panic.

Smith carpooled to work in Deale, Md., in 1999 when one night her driver stopped at a small grocery store, leaving Smith in the pickup alone.

“We parked at the edge of the parking lot with the store entrance and lot behind us,” Smith said. “We had worked late and it was well after dusk.”

Smith relaxed as she sat in the truck, watching cars going through the intersection, waiting for the driver to come back.

“I make note of my emotions because in this peaceful, relaxed state, I was hit with an unbelievably strong sense of fear or danger,” she said. “There was no rational explanation for this intense fear and I was able to be objective. It was really strange to me, feeling this fear all of a sudden.”

Realizing she was slipping into a panic attack, Smith tried to figure out what might have triggered this immediate overwhelming terror.

“The fear or sense of danger didn’t increase or become more intense,” Smith said. “The (initial) intensity was extraordinary.”

Then she noticed a possible trigger for her fear; a group of about 10 young men who were “roughhousing” in the parking lot behind her. Smith leaned closer to the passenger side mirror to watch them.

“A couple of them sounded drunk and it sounded as though it was possible a fight might be brewing,” she said. “I went to move the rear-view mirror to get a better view and saw something out of the corner of my eye.”

From the passenger seat, Smith slowly looked to her left, and found the cause for her terror.

“I looked over at the driver’s window and there, facing me, was a woman looking in at me,” she said. “Not just glancing in, she had her shoulders square to the driver’s door of the pickup, standing about a foot and a half away from the window, which was closed.”

The appearance of the woman rammed the intense fear deeper into Smith.

“My heart shot to my throat and I couldn’t move,” she said. “I just looked at her and she at me.”

Although the harsh shadows cast by the yellow streetlamps obscured part of the woman’s face, Smith could see her eyes. The eyes looked “empty.” Smith said the streetlamps that reflected off everything in the parking lot didn’t reflect in her eyes.

“They appeared dead,” Smith said. “Black voids. Nothing there. She seemed to have a look on her face as if she knew the fear that gripped me and enjoyed it.”

The woman’s gaze held Smith fast.

“I don’t know how long she stood there,” Smith said. “It didn’t seem to be very long, but at the same time, the intense fear made it seem like minutes.”

The woman suddenly turned and got into the passenger seat of a 1972 Plymouth Duster parked beside the pickup where Smith sat.

“The driver, who I couldn’t see, backed the car out of the lot and left,” Smith said. “Immediately, all fear and sense of danger was gone. Very strange to me how sudden it was with it being so intense a few moments before.”

Although Smith has seen this distinctive car a number of times since, she’s never again encountered the sinister woman with the black, dead eyes.

“I filed it away as a question mark and haven’t really thought much about it until I recently read a thread with a reference to ‘black-eyed kids,’” Smith said. “I looked at different blogs referring to these ‘black-eyed kids,’ and came across an anecdote with a description of a woman with black eyes and the unbelievable sense of danger the author experienced and it reminded me of my experience.”

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

A Missouri Bigfoot – Part 2

2009-11-12T09:27:00.002-06:00

Author’s note: This is the second of a two-part story of Bigfoot encounters in Southeast Missouri.

Ken Mattheis had a flat tire. He and his cousin Jim had ridden their bicycles into Leasburg, a rural Southeast Missouri town, and now couldn’t get home – so they called Grandpa.

“My grandpa was in his 90s and he drove really slow,” Mattheis said.

As his grandfather puttered down Route H, Mattheis and his cousin, sitting in the bed of the pickup, saw a man walking in a field.

“I saw what looked like a large man in a light brown winter coat in coveralls with a hood up walking in a field,” he said. “It was all light brown, the hair, face and hands was like the color of hay.”

The man was large and swung his arms like a cross-country skier.

“We got closer and I realized it was a Bigfoot,” Mattheis said. “The hair on top of the head was long and it went straight up and looked really strange like a Conehead.”

The boys sat in the truck, staring at the Bigfoot as their grandfather motored by. The thing never looked at the truck. It just kept walking until it reached the woods.

The boys didn’t say anything to their grandfather, who didn’t see the brown man walking in the field. Mattheis had a more personal experience a few years later.

“I had a truck and was with several of my cousins and his friends and we had nothing to do so I decided to go drive them into the woods that night and go listen for the panther screams,” he said. “We drove into the woods and parked, and I think four or five kids were in back of this truck.”

After a few minutes of silence, the teens heard something large walking toward them through the woods.

“We could hear something large in the woods coming towards us breaking limbs and breathing really loud in and out as if it had breathing problems,” he said. “The kids freaked and wanted to leave, but I said, ‘no, lets see what’s coming.’ I'd like to know what the hell is making all that noise.”

The breathing thing circled the truck, breaking tree limbs and throwing branches toward the boys.

“A kid laying down in back of this truck started punching my back window screaming at me if I didn't get us out of here right now he was going to drag my ass out of the truck and leave me here with it,” Mattheis said. “I started the truck and turned on the lights and left in a hurry as I was more scared of this kid kicking my ass than whatever was in the woods.”

Mattheis is convinced the thing circling the truck was a Bigfoot. He later bought a camera to take a picture of the beast that’s life kept intersecting his own, but has yet to photograph one.

In the 1990s, Mattheis began using the Internet to communicate with Bigfoot researchers and met a researcher named Coonbo.

“Coonbo was the first person that I know (who) claimed to be able to call them to show up,” Mattheis said. “He would hoot like an owl and then we'd hear owl hoots back and we'd hear it coming through the woods and we'd smell the nastiest smelling musk and then we'd leave.”

A heavy musk scent has long been associated with Bigfoot.

“So I started doing this in Missouri and it didn't take long for me to call them to show up,” he said. “My wife has a degree in anthropology and she thought I was just nuts for even thinking Bigfoot existed, so I took her into the woods.”

They walked to the creek – the same creek Mattheis’ grandmother warned him away from – and did an owl call. A call came back.

“I said, it’s going to circle us and come down this hill behind us and do another call,’” he said. “A few minutes later we heard a really loud ‘who.’ She said, ‘that’s not an owl,’ and started crying and got into the car and said, ‘can we go home now?’”

Mattheis waited, telling his wife the thing that made the sound would go to the top of the hill and knock with a tree branch.

It did.

“She said, ‘OK, I believe they exist. Now take me home,’” Mattheis said. “She started crying and to this day she will not go into the woods at night.”

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

A Missouri Bigfoot – Part 1

2009-11-05T12:39:00.000-06:00

Author’s note: This is the first of a two-part story of Bigfoot encounters in Southeast Missouri.

Darkness engulfed the Southeast Missouri farmhouse, the air still in the January night.

Ken Mattheis knelt behind his parent’s house working, meager light illuminating a generator, the only sign of electricity for miles.

“A few years ago the power went at my parents farm house and I went out to help them set up a generator for the first time,” he said.

He’d left a tool in the van, so he walked into the darkness to retrieve it.

“It was a cold, pitch black night,” he said. “I heard footsteps on the ice-covered grass.”

He thought it was his father outside with him, but when a tree branch snap, he knew it wasn’t his father.

“I heard crunch, crunch, then limbs started breaking and falling,” he said. “I turned to see what was causing the limbs to break and saw this large black shadow standing up under a tree behind me.”

The figure knocked down more limbs, then stopped.

“It stood still as if it was waiting for me to do something,” he said. “I thought, ‘crap, you’re not my dad.’ So, calmly I walked away from it.”

Mattheis backed inside the farmhouse.

“My dad was inside the house,” he said. “I told him, ‘we have a visitor,’ and he said, ‘Who?’ I said, ‘a Bigfoot.’”

They looked out the window, but what Mattheis had seen was gone. It would be back. A few months later, Mattheis’ mother saw something strange, and telephoned him.

“She said, ‘well the other night the dog was barking out by the fence and I went out to see what it was barking at and this large black shadow stood up and walked off into the woods,’” Mattheis said. “Now my mom says the dogs are afraid to go outside at night.”

Mattheis went to the spot the next day and found large footprints in the grass. The heel of the foot had pressed deeper than the rest, the curve of the arch almost invisible.

“I have photos of the tracks,” he said. “Not great photos, but its big feet. Should have made casts of them but I didn't.”

Bigfoot sightings aren’t uncommon in Southeastern Missouri. According to reports, in the early 1980s, while camping near the Meramec River, a seven-year-old boy saw a large man-like figure covered in long, black hair near his campsite about 17 miles from the Mattheis farmhouse. In late 2000, a group of campers saw a “massive” bipedal, hairy creature walking amongst the cabins of a campsite within 20 miles from the farm. Its arms were long and swung wide as it walked; it’s head crested like a gorilla’s.

The specter of Bigfoot has been with Mattheis all his life.

“My parents owned a home by my grandparent’s farm in Crawford County and I spent summers in this home and spent a lot of time with them,” he said. “My grandmother was Native American and she would yell at me and my cousins to stay out of the creeks or the Boogey man will get ya.”

The young Mattheis thought she was just trying to keep the children away from the creek, so the warning made them want to go even more. They soon found the warning had nothing to do with the creek.

“A few times we went, we would hear something follow us and it would break tree limbs and this would scare the crap out of us kids,” he said. “We'd run home and get swatted with whatever Grandma had in her hands at the time, and she'd say, ‘keep out of the creeks.’”

Another time, the thing sent Mattheis running until he was lost and a neighbor drove him home. He didn’t see what had scared him at the creek until he was about 10 years old.

“I was sleeping in a bed with my older brother and we had the windows open,” he said. “I heard sticks breaking and I lifted the shade to look out and I saw a large, light tan, shaggy-haired animal walk by the window and I said, ‘what is that?’”

His brother jumped up, shut the shade and told him to go back to sleep, it was only a deer.

“I don't think he saw it,” Mattheis said. “It scared the crap out of me.”

A few years later, he saw it in daylight.

Next week: Daylight sightings.

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Paranormal Investigator is Looking for Stories on Ghosts that Get Personal

2009-10-31T12:17:00.001-05:00

Have you ever heard your name spoken in an empty house? Or a loved one calling to you from another room, only to find no one is in that room – at least no one you can see?

Ryan Straub wants to talk with you.

Straub, founder of the Missouri paranormal group Tir Firnath (which means, “to observe the dead” in Tolkien elvish.), is researching these talking spirits for an upcoming book – and he’s no stranger to spirits that take notice of the living. When a car accident injured a then 16-year-old Straub, it awoke something in him that had, until that point, lain dormant.

“I was hurt really bad,” Straub, now 25, said. “Then I started seeing things, even that night. Spirits.”

As he saw more and more people – dead people – no one around him could see, he set out to find out what he was experiencing.

“That’s what’s sparked my interested in the paranormal,” he said. “I’ve dedicated my life to it. Since then I’ve been indulging myself in research.”

Straub’s group has investigated spots in Idaho, Illinois, Missouri and Oklahoma, and specializes in hauntings. Straub hopes the research for his book will help others who have experienced these talking spirits.

Straub is looking for the following encounters:

- Calls by name: the spirit or ghost calls out the name of the intended victim.

- Calls for help or assistance: the spirit or ghost claims to need some kind of aid.

- Lured by unnatural sensory phenomenon: the ghost or spirit tries to draw victims to them through unnatural means in unlikely places; for example, appearing as a beautiful woman, making noise that attracts people, like playing, screaming or screeching, or smells like cooking or perfume.

- Mimics, impersonates or recreates: the ghost or spirit mimics your voice, impersonates loved ones, recreates conversations, or appears as you or someone you know.

- Calls by control: hypnosis or possession.

- Lures by irrational response: the ghost or spirit causes fear, anger, or an anxiety to make you want to lash out.

Had any of these encounters? Contact Ryan Straub at: tir_firnath@hotmail.com or comment on his blog, http://tirfirnath.blogspot.com/; he wants to hear your story.

Night of the Harlequin

2009-10-20T13:58:00.001-05:00

The thing in five-year-old Dan Mitchell’s bedroom in southeastern Wisconsin only came at night. As Mitchell lie in bed, his parents far down the hall, a thin, androgynous creature would appear and tell him stories.

It looked almost frightened.

“I would tell my mom about this and she always thought it was just my imagination getting the best of me,” Mitchell, now 33, said.

But he knew it was real, and it looked “like a harlequin.”

“Its clothes were absolutely motley and strange,” Mitchell said. “Its face looked like it was in a perpetual state of shock.”

Large, wide-open eyes – too large to be human eyes – stared at Mitchell through the gray of night as words spilled through its always open, round mouth.

“This being referred to itself as the ‘tooth fairy’ when I had asked,” Mitchell said. “For whatever reason I was never afraid of it, and I can not remember anything it may have told me.”

It did, however, appear to try and comfort the boy if he began to look afraid.

“It always attempted to be funny and almost clown-like so that I wouldn’t shudder in terror,” Mitchell said. “Was this some sort of imaginary friend I had created? I wasn’t that kind of kid.”

Mitchell’s family never saw this “Harlequin,” nor did they believe him.

“I know this sounds crazy, but I assure you that I remember this high strangeness almost as well as I remember the normal events of my childhood,” he said.

Like one night in the spring of 1981 when the Mitchell family sat down for dinner.

“I remember that my dad was very agitated,” Mitchell said. “He kept saying that he was hearing somebody walking around upstairs. I was terrified by this because my Dad was so agitated and I had never seen him scared like that. He was a very tough guy.”

Then Mitchell’s father shot up from the dinner table, terror splashed across his face.

“Immediately there was a voice that he heard coming from upstairs,” Mitchell said. “While I want to say that it sounded like a sinister and terrifying laugh, I believe it was just a howl of some sort that caused a tingling feeling up my spine.”

The next thing Mitchell remembered was his father laughing, the look of terror still gripping him.

“He was frozen with this awful look on his face,” he said. “Everybody at the table was just frozen. The next thing I remember is waking up at the dinner table with spilled milk all over myself and the table.”

His family simply resumed eating dinner, the laugh seemingly forgotten.

“This situation was so traumatic to my young mind that I honestly believe that I have blotted a large portion of this event out,” Mitchell said. “I have always thought that whatever was visiting me in my room at night was this ‘person’ walking around in the upstairs of our house, possibly looking for me or wondering where I had went.”

Mitchell recently mentioned the dinner event to his father.

“My dad turned white like he thought it was a bad dream he had,” he said. “He really was adamant about not talking about the subject any further when I kept pursuing it.”

As Mitchell grew older, the Harlequin’s nighttime visits stopped – until he was 18.

“I ran into this same being many years later,” he said. “I was driving with a few friends late at night on our way home from a party.”

The young men saw a teenage girl walking in the street in front of the car, her movements strange and jerky.

“We thought that maybe she was drunk,” Mitchell said. “Someone in the car thought it was a friend of theirs so we were going to pick her up and give her a ride home.”

As they pulled closer, the girl began to walk toward the car. As she closed to near 30 feet, Mitchell realized the person was wearing “a really bad wig.”

“My first impression was that it was a man dressed like a woman,” he said. “She looked incredibly angry and was making even jerkier movements that were almost threatening.”

One of Mitchell’s buddies whispered in fear.

“Oh, my God,” the boy said. “Look at her eyes.”

They were the eyes of the Harlequin.

Somebody in the car said, “floor it,” and Mitchell did.

“There was panic in that car,” he said. “I can tell you that every guy I dropped off that night made a mad dash to their front doors. I, unfortunately, had to drive back that way, but luckily didn’t see her again.”

He’s convinced the thing he and his friends saw that night was the Harlequin.

“I got a pretty good look at her and I can tell you that it was obvious that she was trying to disguise herself,” he said. “It was the same face of perpetual shock, but this time it terrified me completely. I had the feeling that she was yelling at me for some reason. My honest impression that night was that this person was dead or simply not human.”

Mitchell hasn’t seen this entity since that night in 1994, but he has started hearing terrifying screams in the night from a small patch of woods near his apartment building.

The Harlequin may not be finished with him.

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Hat Man in Brazil

2009-10-12T10:08:00.000-05:00

The young man lived in a rental house a few doors from the home where H.W.* grew up in southern Brazil. A few years later, the young man moved out, a husband and wife moved in.

Although these people didn’t, and don’t, know one another, they had something in common – they knew something dark often walked the halls of that house.

“The male was a young lawyer starting out, while the female was an architect/homemaker,” H.W. said. “They both knocked on my mother’s door a bit distraught.”

There were years between the knocks – one in the mid-1990s, the other in early 2000, but the people behind the knocks told the same story.

“They described how a dark shadow wearing a fedora hat would frequently walk by them and disappear through the walls,” H.W. said. “Both residents described the black Shadow figure as being in the shape of an old man.”

This Shadow figure, a paranormal entity called the Hat Man, is usually an ominous figure. People often report feeling the entity is somehow feeding from their fear. However, H.W. doesn’t think this Hat Man was threatening.

“As far as I know, the Hat Man wasn’t a menace to them,” H.W. said. “He would just walk by and go right through the walls, in a silent manner, without ever acknowledging their presence.”

The witnesses came to H.W.’s mother’s door, he feels, because she was the oldest person living on the street. As such, she knew the person who built the house. The man, who died in the late 1950s, often wore a fedora, although that style was common in Brazil at the time.

“It was customary for Brazilians to wear those hats up to mid-’60s, as their style was highly influenced by Hollywood,” H.W. said. “My late father used to wear those hats as any young professional.”

These shadowy, fedora-wearing figures have been reported worldwide, from North America to Europe, South Africa and Australia. Although Hollywood’s images are far-reaching, the presence of this entity on multiple continents has H.W. curious.

“It’s an intriguing story indeed, especially since other sightings of the same type (are) happening all over the world,” H.W. said. “I wouldn’t be sharing this story if it wasn’t because of the fedora hat detail, which immediately called my attention. Why the hat?”

Although H.W.’s mother is now deceased, his family still owns their home and when he visits, he walks past the old house where the Hat Man wanders the halls. The building is now a day care center.

“It’s full of little kids who spend most of the day in there,” H.W. said. “I sometimes feel the urge to ask the teachers or caretakers, without specifics, if they ever see anything unusual in that place. But I feel reluctant, considering the nature of their business and potential legal implications for unproven rumors.”

The last report H.W. heard from that house was from the couple in 2000, but remembers all the witnesses to be sincere.

“My family believed both witnesses for describing the same exactly scenario years apart from each other, also because both had stable backgrounds,” H.W. said. “What are the odds that two different tenants would describe, many years apart, the same peculiar event, without ever knowing each other?”

*Name withheld by request.

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

They Had Black Eyes

2009-10-05T22:51:00.002-05:00

The children looked out of place in the night. Craig Besand walked down the street toward his flat in Norwich, England, when two figures approached him.

“They appeared to be young boys,” Besand said. “One was about 13 years old, the other one was about nine.”

At the time Besand, a Missourian, was studying abroad at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

“I(’d been) at a friend’s house having a few drinks until the late hours,” he said. “My friend asked me if I was all right to walk back to my flat and if I wanted I could crash on his couch. I told him I would be all right, I just wanted to get home and go to bed. It was after 1 in the morning.”

Between Besand’s flat and his friend’s flat was a cemetery – that’s where he saw the children.

“My friend lives up the street from a very old cemetery on Dereham Road,” Besand said. “I walk past this cemetery every time I go to his house.”

He’d made it a few blocks when he saw two figures approach him.

“They were both wearing hoodies, sneakers; typical kid stuff,” Besand said. “The older one said that they were trying to find the graveyard and that they were lost.”

Then the boy asked Besand, “could you please take us there?”

The age of the children and the late night struck Besand as strange.

“I figured it was odd that young kids were hanging out in graveyards at this time of night,” he said. “But kids are into whatever so I agreed to take them there. They asked me very politely and the cemetery was on my way home anyway.”

As Besand escorted the boys toward the cemetery, he looked at them closer. The oldest boy’s hair was jet black, “his skin was porcelain white and veiny.” Then Besand saw the eyes.

“They both had eyes that were as dark as coal, no sign of white,” Besand said. “The eyes were the most distinct features, it was like they had no souls or nothing inside of them.”

He asked these Black-Eyed Children where they lived. They named a nearby street.

“I thought that was strange because this cemetery is huge and almost everyone in town knows where it is,” he said.

When they reached the cemetery gates the older one asked Besand to come in with them.

“I told them no, I was going home,” he said. “He asked me again to go in with them. I still told him no.”

The younger Black-Eyed Child, Besand noticed, appeared nervous.

“(He had) this look of anxiety about him,” Besand said. “Then the older one stopped asking me. He started to make a demand for me to go into the graveyard with them.”

Then the older child’s demeanor changed.

“The frustration on this kid’s face was trying to be hidden behind one of the most evil grins that I ever saw,” Besand said. “My heart was pounding in my throat at this time as the older one said, ‘we wouldn’t harm you,’ with that grin on his face.”

The grin, Besand found, was hypnotic.

“Oddly enough, I was becoming more drawn to him and I was thinking that I should go in with them,” he said. “Then the silent younger kid said something that scared the hell out of me.”

The younger one said, “We shouldn’t be doing this.”

“Immediately after he spoke I snapped out of my trance,” Besand said. “My flight-or-fight instinct kicked in and I ran as fast as I could. I looked back to see if they were running after me, but they had vanished. I ran all the way home.”

About a week later, Besand wandered into a magic shop whose owner, he discovered, was Wiccan.

“I bought some incense and then got into a conversation about me being an American, traveling, and then about haunted places in town,” he said. “So I told her my story of the Black-Eyed Children. She told me that I wasn’t imagining anything.”

Besand asked her what they were.

“She told me that no one knows,” he said. “The people who found that out aren’t here to tell about it. She said they could have been anything from demons to fairies.”

He asked her why they would want him to go willingly with them to the cemetery.

“She said that they could just want something from you or they could have taken me to their realm,” he said. “She also told me that I did the right thing by running away, and that I’m never going to find out what they were so I’m better off just going on with my life and not thinking too much about it. I tell other people about it and they either get creeped out or they have a good laugh at my expense.”

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

A Trip to Gravity Hill

2009-10-01T10:34:00.006-05:00

On a quiet country road west of Freeman, Mo., past railroad tracks and between two hills, almost throwing distance from the Kansas state line, sits a flat spot in the gravel.

Some locals, like Kylie Guier of Freeman, claim that if you stop on that spot and put your vehicle in neutral, the car will start moving, sometimes up to 25 miles per hour.

People say gravity doesn’t work there.

“Everybody calls it Gravity Hill,” Guier said. “It’s out on this gravel road in the middle of nowhere. I don’t know anyone who’s an expert on it. Everyone just knows it’s there.”

Guier’s been to Gravity Hill a number of times, as have most area people she knows, and, “I’ve never known anybody it hasn’t worked for.”

It didn’t work for Jake Koehn of nearby Adrian, Mo.

“(My friends and I) went there around 6 p.m. during the summer, so plenty of daylight,” he said. “We parked at the bottom of the hill, put the truck in neutral and did not see much for a result. After about 10 minutes, we gave up on it and left.”

He may have given up too soon.

Urban legend has it if you sprinkle flour or gravel dust on the trunk of the car, drivers will later find child-sized handprints in the dust.

I’m so there.

I pulled my minivan onto 299th Street (much too gravelly and rural to be called a street) from Route D in Cass County on a clear September afternoon. Sure I was in a minivan, not the Mystery Machine, but I think a minivan’s what the Scooby gang drove when they grew up.

The lane leading to Gravity Hill is surrounded by wavy pastureland, the occasional pond and patches of sunflowers breaking the swaths of green. Over the railroad tracks and up two hills – according to many listings on the Internet – you’re supposed to drive to the end of the lane, turn around and come to rest at the bottom. Then the magic happens.

Many people who’ve been to Gravity Hill claim the moving car phenomenon is an optical illusion and, as I parked the minivan at a spot between hills that looked flat, I found it wasn’t.

The level I brought to Gravity Hill showed where I’d parked was anything but level. So, when I put the vehicle in neutral, it moved.

Duh.

I let the minivan coast farther down the hill and checked the road again. Not level.

But the next time I stopped, I found a spot in the road that was flat. I moved the level all around my vehicle and the ground was sufficiently flat enough the minivan shouldn’t move unless it became so embarrassed from being a minivan it collapsed.

OK. The ground was flat. I marked the spot, hopped into the driver’s seat and slid the gear into neutral.

The minivan moved immediately. Three mph, five mph, seven mph, the sound of gravel popping beneath the tires carried through the open windows of the minivan’s cab.

The van stopped halfway up the hill and I put my foot on the brake to keep it from rolling back down.

Sweet.

I took my foot off the brake and, yes, the van rolled back down.

After I placed the minivan back onto the flat spot, I ran the level around the van again. Yep. Still flat.

I did this six more times. Five times my vehicle seemed to move of its own volition. One time it just sat there and a bee flew through the cab.

Driving away from Gravity Hill, not one darned fingerprint on my bumper, I realized I’d been a part of something weird. Could Gravity Hill be an optical illusion? Sure. Even after I’d determined the ground was flat and my van shouldn’t have moved, I’m willing to consider that. It’s still a mystery.

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Encounters with Werewolves

2009-09-18T10:46:00.001-05:00

The quiet, hidden cemetery in Chariton County, Mo., sits at the end of a slice of gravel snaking into hills. A dark roof of trees turns the long stretch of rocks and dirt into a leafy tunnel.

Ryan Straub, founder of the Missouri-based ghost hunting group Tir Firnath, has often visited the cemetery and experienced strange things. However, nothing has disturbed him as much as what he and fellow Tir Firnath member Mike Haurcade saw standing on that gravel road.

“Mike and I we were leaving one day,” Straub said. “As we were leaving, we were in the middle of the hills and we saw a very large dog in the road. It stood up on its hind legs and left the road.”

Straub and Haurcade froze as the beast walked on two legs into the thick trees.

“That bothered me,” Straub said. “The only thing I could think of was it was the mythical beast the werewolf.”

Werewolves, in various forms, have existed in many cultures across the world. From the Medieval European werewolf that dominates horror movies, to American Indian skinwalkers, the image of a man changing into a beast has terrified people for centuries. But, sitting safely in a cozy house, watching television, the werewolf stalking the night is nothing but legend.

Some people think that’s dead wrong.

The glow of city lights bathed the Arizona night in gray as four teenagers walked onto the Shalimar Golf Course in Tempe. Colin Perkins, now an adult, was in high school when he and his friends, bored with their weekly Bible study meeting, walked outside.

“The girl’s house we did it at lived right on (the) golf course,” Perkins said.

The Shalimar Golf Course sits in a highly populated residential area of the city, so the group tried to be quiet as they kept to the edge of the golf course, walking along palm trees that lined a wall.

“We were there talking and (goofing) around,” Perkins said. “My girlfriend says something like, ‘hey something just jumped out of that palm tree.’”

The trees were approximately 35 feet tall, so the other teens laughed and resumed their conversation.

“A few seconds later she lets out a blood-curdling scream, just pure shocked terror,” Perkins said.

As Perkins turned toward his girlfriend, he saw something he couldn’t believe.

“I look in the direction and there’s a … creature lumbering along the wall towards us,” Perkins said. “It was as tall as me, six foot, hunched over, huge snout like a werewolf.”

The beast, blacker than the night surrounding it, lunged toward the teens and they ran.

“It was chasing after us,” Perkins said. “It was running along the wall toward me and I just turned and ran, I didn't think to look back.”

The teens never saw the thing again, although something about the encounter still confuses Perkins.

“It was in the middle of town,” he said. “That’s what always gets me about that thing. Not out in the woods or at a secluded cabin, but in Tempe, Ariz.”

But Arizona and Missouri are not alone in these encounters.

Kori Williams, her cousin Richard and two friends, were driving near Midlothian, Ill., on a late-night trip when a large, man-like beast ran into the road.

“A six- to seven-foot man beast thing ran from the Rubio Woods to the woods behind an electrical fence of some kind,” Williams said. “Richard swerved to miss the creature.”

The beast was covered in bluish-gray fur, its snout was “like a coyote or wolf, but longer,” its eyes “were like holes,” and the smell of wet dog waft throughout the car. Although the four didn’t see the creature for long, the thing that stuck with Williams was the beast’s hands.

“I call it ‘manlike,’ because of its size and hands,” Williams said. “They looked like human hands except for the fingers were really long, clawed and covered in fur. Richard thought it was a werewolf or something.”

A universe of the unknown lies just beyond human perception – maybe there is truth to the legends.

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Disappearing Girl – Part Two

2009-09-14T09:51:00.000-05:00

Author’s note: This is the second of a two-part series about the Torres family who, after moving into their new home, discovered something was already there.

Pouring through the stacks of memories her home’s previous occupants left behind, Sammy Torres unmasked the spirit of a young Hispanic girl that sits on her son’s bed.

“One day as I was looking through the photo albums left by the previous owners I saw a newspaper clipping about a car accident,” she said. “It told about a Hispanic family who had been in an accident in which the father and the 12-year-old daughter had been killed.”

A memorial card, Torres presumed had been passed out at a funeral, showed a picture of the girl with long braided hair.

“There were also several pictures of her at different times in her life,” she said. “There were school pictures, pictures from birthday parties and Christmas and pictures of a laughing young girl splashing in a swimming pool and many family photos.”

It was the same girl she had seen that first day in the home, and the same girl who sat on her son’s bed.

And, she later found, the spirit of the little girl wasn’t alone.

“Recently, I was awakened by the feeling of someone staring at me and when I opened my eyes there standing beside the bed was an old woman,” Sammy said. “She was wearing a dress that looked like it was from the late 1800s to the early 1900s.”

The dress was long and black with a high collar and puffy sleeves. The top of the dress had buttons on the front and the apparition wore a cameo brooch at the throat of her dress. It’s hair was gray and pulled into a bun.

“She looked very stern,” Sammy said. “I lay there looking at her for a few seconds and then she was gone. She just disappeared. We have seen her several times since then and always in the bedroom. And we always smell stale cigarette smoke right before she appears.”

But the apparitions don’t appear singularly. Sammy has at least felt them both in the room at the same time. Sammy was lying in bed one day when they visited her.

“I could feel them leaning on the bed and then they touched the top of my head and stroked my hair,” Sammy said. “At first I thought it was my husband as this is the way he does when I’m not feeling well, but he never said anything so I turned to look at him but he wasn’t there.”

When her husband eventually came into the room, Sammy told of her visitors

“He then asked me, ‘why is your head wet on top?’” Sammy said. “I told him I didn’t know my head was wet. I told him about the spirit or whatever it was touching the top of my head.”

When Sammy reached to touch the spot where her visitor touched her, her husband was right. It was wet.

“I can only say that that was one of creepiest things I have experienced here,” she said.

Sammy has also felt an unseen force tugging her hair and one night woke because she was choking.

“I tried to sit up but couldn’t as something or someone had wrapped my long braid around one of the little wood bars in the head board of my bed,” she said. “Not long after that I cut my hair.”

Balls of light, globs of mist and an ominous black mass often float around their house and hangers rattle in the closets, but have not driven the Torres family from their home.

“We are not frightened by them,” Sammy said. “I think we have gotten used to them being here.”

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Disappearing Girl – Part One

2009-09-08T09:42:00.001-05:00

Author’s note: This is the first of a two-part series about the Torres family who, after moving into their new home, discovered something was already there.

When Sammy Torres and her family moved into the mobile home in 2004, they knew something was wrong. The former tenants had left in a hurry.

“The people who had owned it before had just up and left without taking any of their belongings,” she said. “They left their furniture, their appliances, photo albums with baby pictures and other family photos. They didn’t even take their clothes. I have tried to find anyone who may have known the people that lived here before to see if anyone knew anything about them or the reason they fled as they did.”

Neighbors don’t seem to know.

Unpacking boxes the first night Torres’ family stayed in the home, Sammy saw something she couldn’t explain.

“I was sitting on the floor in front of the television unpacking a box of DVDs and videos and putting them away,” she said. “The television was off and I saw on the blank screen a young girl with very long braided hair walk behind me from the direction of the bedroom towards the kitchen.”

Thinking it was her youngest daughter going into the kitchen, she kept unpacking the box – then she realized the girl never left the kitchen. She looked in the kitchen; no one was there.

“I got up from the floor and went to check on my daughter but when I poked my head inside her bedroom she was fast asleep,” Sammy said. “I thought maybe I had been so engrossed in what I was doing that I didn’t see her go back by.”

Then, day after day, strange things began to work their way into the Torres family’s life and Sammy began to realize it hadn’t been her daughter she’d seen in the television screen that first day – something was in her house.

“Things began to happen pretty regular,” Sammy said.

The cabinet under the bathroom sink randomly opened and slammed shut when no one was around, Sammy heard footsteps in the hallway when no one else was home, and everyone heard voices that didn’t belong to anyone in the family.

But the children experienced much more than Sammy and her husband.

“My eight-year-old son would tell me about a Hispanic girl who would go into his room and sit on his bed,” Sammy said. “I thought he was either dreaming or had an imaginary friend as some children do.”

The boy was adamant the girl in his room was real.

“He insisted that she was there and not just his imagination but he said that she would just disappear,” Sammy said. “He said she would be sitting on the bed or standing by the door one minute and then gone the next. My son said she was a ghost. I was pretty sure he was right.”

The experiences escalated. Family members would see something in the corner of their eyes that would dart across the hallway, they heard whispering and conversations although no one else was in the room

“When my two-year-old grandson would come to visit he would play hide and seek with someone only he could see,” she said. “He would stand in the doorway of my son’s room and tell his invisible playmate, ‘You can’t get me. You can’t find me.’ He would run, jump on the couch and get behind me and say, ‘she’s coming. She’s going to find me,’ as he was peeking around me and looking towards the bedroom.”

When Sammy asked her grandson who was going to find him, he would say, “the girl in Uncle’s bedroom.”

One day, Sammy saw the invisible entity play back.

“My grandson was sitting on the floor in the hallway playing with a ball,” she said. “He would roll the ball down the hall, the ball would stop and roll back to him as though someone had stopped it and rolled it back to him. This happened several times.”

Then there was the whistle.

“Sometimes late at night, usually between midnight and 1 a.m., we would hear the whistle of a train that sounded as though it were in the far-off distance,” she said. “There are no trains that run through our town or even near our town and hasn’t been for a very long time.”

Her husband, who seemed immune to the whistle, eventually heard it.

“Finally one night as we lay in bed talking we heard the faint far off sound of a train whistle blowing,” Sammy said. “My husband who loves trains said that it was the whistle of an old steam engine. He said those are not around anymore so there was no reason for that whistle to be heard. That was the last time we heard that train whistle.”

But the paranormal occurrences didn’t stop with the whistle, and they began to become more real to the entire family – Sammy and her husband saw the girl.

“We see the apparition of a young Hispanic girl with very long braided hair peek around the corner of the bedroom door and then disappear,” Sammy said.

In Part Two, the entities show themselves.

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

There’s Something in the House

2009-08-26T13:01:00.000-05:00

The house in Ducor, Calif., seemed perfect. Four bedrooms, two bathrooms and enough acreage for Tammy’s horses, cats and dogs.

It was also near family.

“In 1996, my three daughters and I moved here from Texas,” she said. “My husband had passed away recently and we needed to be near family.”

And the rent, Tammy had found anywhere from $600 to $1,500 a month for something of that size, was only $350 in Ducor.

“I couldn’t believe my good luck,” she said.

But she soon found the reason the rent was so cheap – it was haunted.

“One of the first things we noticed was the wallpaper in the bedrooms,” she said. “One of the rooms had wallpaper that made it look like a padded cell. It literally looked like it had mattresses stuck around the room. The next room had barbed wire wallpaper around it, but the best was yet to come.”

The ceiling in the master bedroom was black, surrounded by dark purple walls. Tammy later wondered if the house had decided the decor for the former occupants.

The first night in the house seemed quiet, but Tammy’s middle daughter sent terror through Tammy over breakfast.

“(She) told me that she had seen the shadow of a man kind of float past her bedroom window,” Tammy said. “I thought she meant outside the window but she said that, ‘no, he was in her room.’”

Tammy hired men to install alarms around the house and yard the same day. But that night, when something invaded the rooms of Tammy and her daughter, the alarms didn’t go off.

“I woke up feeling as though something or someone had sat down on the edge of my bed,” she said. “But when I opened my eyes no one was there so I thought I was dreaming.”

Then the water faucet in the kitchen came on.

“I went to see if one of the kids was up getting a drink of water but no one was there,” she said. “As I started to walk out of the kitchen to go back to bed the door to the fridge flew open.”

Although she couldn’t explain what happened, Tammy went back to bed.

“The next morning my daughter again told me about the guy who walked past her window,” she said. “But this time he had lay down on the bed next to her and was breathing and whispering in her ear.”

When Tammy asked why she didn’t wake her up, the girl said she was too scared to get out of bed.

“She just pulled the covers up over her head and went to sleep,” Tammy said. “That began a nightly ritual for her and for some reason she never went to my room to wake me up to tell me.”

Tammy’s family began living with the faucets turning on by themselves, the television and stereo blaring in the middle of the night, and the refrigerator and the front and back doors standing wide open. But there was more.

“One evening, as my daughters and I were watching television in the living room, a roll of toilet paper flew down the hallway, landed on the floor in the entrance to the living room and rolled into the kitchen,” Tammy said. “We were the only ones there and there was no explanation as to who had thrown the toilet roll down the hall.”

Tammy took her daughters out of town one weekend and asked a family friend to stay at the house to care for the animals. When they returned home, the friend was gone.

“He had left a note,” Tammy said. “It said that he would never set foot in that house again and he advised me to get my family out of it ASAP.”

When she later spoke to him, he told her about the faucets, television and stereo coming on by themselves, and that something invisible had thrown a two-liter bottle of soda at his head.

“That was the last straw for me as well as I didn’t want to put my children through anymore than they had already endured,” Tammy said. “If a bottle of soda could be thrown at someone who didn’t live there, what might happen to my children if I stayed?”

Tammy didn’t try to discover what was haunting the house – she wasn’t going to be in the house long enough to care.

“We moved out a week later and never went back to that house,” she said.

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt c/o The Examiner, 410 S. Liberty, Independence, Mo. 64050, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Old Hand

2009-08-18T14:07:00.000-05:00

As 12-year-old Chris Wham and his family watched construction workers build their home in St. Charles, Mo., subdivision, everything looked fine. It was 1979.

By 1980, Wham wasn’t so sure.

“In the summer of 1979, my family moved into its first new house,” Wham said. “Not just a new house to us, but a brand new house. In the months before the house was completed, my step-father would drive us out to it and we would watch the men work on it.”

The land was once an apple orchard and sat almost empty as the house went up.

“Our house was one of the first few completed on the street,” Wham said. “So I spent much of the year watching the other houses getting built and making new friends whenever kids would move in.”

A year went by and Wham’s family had comfortably settled in the house.

“It was towards end of summer 1980, school had just started the week before, and I was already playing hooky,” he said. “ I just didn’t want to go to school that day, so I faked a stomach ache so I could stay home.”

Wham stayed in his room until his mother had to go on an errand.

“Near 12 noon, my mother asked me to keep an eye on my baby brother while she ran to the store for more diapers,” he said.

The round trip to the store, Wham figured, might take 15 minutes, and his little brother was sleeping, so he had time to play.

“I told her I would. I’d do anything to get her out of the house, so I could turn off her horrible soap operas,” he said. “As soon as she left I hopped into the big brown La-Z-Boy recliner that was parked in front of the TV and changed over to Channel 11. It was now exactly noon and Green Acres was just coming on.”

As he sat there, the sound of the program drifting through the living room, Wham knew he wasn’t alone.

“No sooner had the theme song ended did I hear, and feel, a rapping over my left shoulder on the back of the big La-Z-Boy,” he said. “A soft thumpity thump, thumpity thump, thumpity thump. The same type of sound an impatient person might create with his fingers on a desk.”

Wham was sure his mother had come home and he was in trouble.

“My first and immediate thought was … ‘Wow, she’s back quick. She must be checking up on me. How did she get in so quietly?’” he said.

But a car hadn’t pull up to the house. No car door creaked open, nor did one close. No footsteps came up the stairs. Fear clutched Wham’s stomach.

“As the thumping continued, I turned my head up and to the left, expecting to see my mother hovering over me,” Wham said.

Something was hovering over him, but it wasn’t his mother.

“I saw a ghostly hand and arm tapping its fingers on the back of my chair,” Wham said. “From the position I was in, I couldn’t see much farther than the elbow, nor did I want to look any farther.”

The entity appeared to be grayish-white and translucent, like smoke – except for the arm.

“The outline of the hand and arm was very well defined,” he said. “I could clearly see the veins and tendons on the back of the hand. The fingers were long and thin with long pointy, dirty fingernails. On the middle finger was a large ring, that even through the transparency of the apparition, appeared to be silver with a large oval black stone in the center.”

Wham turned back toward the television, hoping the arm would go away – it didn’t. The thumpity thump went on.

“I tried to act like I didn’t just see anything,” he said. “I tried to block it from my mind. Then, from across the house, I heard my baby brother as he began to cry.”

The crying broke Wham’s fear. He launched himself out of the chair and ran to his brother’s room holding him until their mother returned.

“As soon as she arrived, I told her my story and she didn’t believe me,” Wham said. “By this time in my life, I had gained a reputation for being a practical joker, and my mother thought this was just another one of my tricks. It most certainly was not.”

Many years have now past at the home without incident, but something lingers in Wham’s mind.

“I do not know if this has anything to do with this story, but the very next day after I saw the hand, I returned from school to find our yard had been tilled over and grass seed had been planted,” he said. “As I walked up and down the rows, freshly dug into the yard, I found my first arrowhead. I’ve long since lost it, but I’ve always wondered if it had something to do with the ghostly hand.”

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo. 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Thing in the Sky

2009-08-11T14:12:00.000-05:00

Cool air poured through the open windows of the car as Lisa Becker and her husband pulled through their suburban Chicago neighborhood of Oak Brook one night in 1996.

Nature painted the dusk pink, orange and red, but something dark suddenly smeared the canvas.

“As we approached our subdivision, we saw a large blackness in the air,” Becker said. “It was about eight feet in diameter, about 100 feet away from us, and about 30 feet in the air. It was moving in a straight line.”

Her husband also saw the black figure.

“It had no specific shape and its edges undulated,” she said. “As it flew closer we pulled over to watch it. It was so low that you could have hit it with a rock.”

When they noticed the object, the Beckers later named the “pterodactyl,” it slowly and noiselessly crept through the sky from east to west about 50 yards from the back of their house.

“It moved in a perfectly straight line as if it were on a tightrope,” she said.

The couple watched the object as it sailed about 10 feet past them, 30 feet in the air, and folded in upon itself, disappearing.

“It was not a vehicle,” Becker said. “The best way to describe it would be to say it looked like a very large flat stingray (with) no tail. It moved in a perfectly straight line, and never varied from its path.”

This left the college-educated Beckers wondering what they saw.

“My husband thought it was strange, but didn’t have any particular emotional response to the thing,” Becker said. “Also it didn’t seem to have any sort of depth to it. It was like looking into a very dark spot that could have blotted out anything behind it. It didn’t have any wind or exhaust in its trail. Our best thought, though entirely illogical, was that it was a rip in the space-time continuum.”

Whatever the black, undulating “pterodactyl” was flying over their house, the memory has stayed with the Beckers for 13 years.

“I asked myself at the time, ‘how did the object make me feel?’” she said. “It wasn’t pleasant, maybe even slightly menacing. Not that it was menacing me. It creeped me out a little that it clearly came from the direction of my back yard. So it easily could have crossed over my house.”

The couple, that now lives in Creve Coeur Mo., hasn’t seen the object since.

“My husband and I were amazed. We’re just regular people who saw something strange one day and still can’t reconcile that thing with our logical minds,” Becker said. “This stuff is sort of like UFOs in that there is no one you can talk to or no one to report it to. At least with UFOs there is MUFON. Ever since then I’ve been wondering if anyone else has ever seen something like it.”

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt c/o The Examiner, 410 S. Liberty, Independence, Mo. 64050, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Little Ghost in the Mirror

2009-08-04T10:48:00.006-05:00

Photo courtesy of Kim Luney of Southwest Ghost Finders from Springfield, Mo.

Arcadia Valley Academy’s red brick buildings aren’t original to the campus, but they’ve still been there a long time.

The academy, in Ironton, Mo., opened in 1846 as a Methodist high school and served as a Union military hospital during the Civil War. However, it is best known from its later incarnation as a Catholic girls school that ran from 1877 to 1971. It also served as a convent for nuns of the Ursaline Order until 1985. It has most recently been a bed and breakfast and antique mall.

Most of the buildings, such as the Administration building, the Auditorium, and the Gymnasium, were built between 1907 and 1934, and something unknown lurks in these buildings of the old Academy.

Belinda Clark-Ache, founder/owner of the paranormal investigation group Haunted Missouri Paranormal Studies, heard stories of a haunting at the 200-room academy and conducted a thorough investigation there.

“We were there every month, April through October,” she said. “I used to just go up by myself and rent a room for the night. All the potential; all the earmarks for a haunting were there.”

Such as a disembodied girl’s voice that said “Lucy,” and the presence of orbs. Although orbs, small balls of light captured by digital photography, are sketchy evidence at best – they can often be explained as dust particles, insects or moisture in the air – some are more convincing. Clark-Ache’s group captured many orbs on video that were a mystery to them.

“We got some interesting moving orbs,” she said. “I’m not an orb person, but we have hours of video from the third floor hallway. One winter evening we had moving orbs up and down the hallway. We could never explain them away to our satisfaction.”

Although Clark-Ache’s group found some cursory evidence the Academy is haunted, they weren’t entirely convinced.

“I did an experiment the first few months. I would take (groups of visitors) on a walking tour of the place,” Clark-Ache said. “I asked if anyone got any certain feelings. It turned out after about 60 people; we were averaging seven out of 10 people feeling something out on the third floor senior hallway in the dormitory. But I didn’t get anything compelling.”

However, paranormal investigator Kim Luney, of Southwest Ghost Finders from Springfield, Mo., did.

Southwest Ghost Finders visited the Academy on invitation from Clark-Ache.

“They did not tell us any history,” Luney said. “We like to go in cold, investigate and hear the history later. It validates the findings.”

Luney stayed in the Priest’s room during her visit, across the hall from a paranormal investigation group from Posey County Clark-Ache also invited.

“We kind of wandered around,” Luney said. “We went in the Bishop’s Room and snapped a bunch of pictures. Posey County showed up and we headed out of the room. I turned around and snapped a picture of the corner where a mirror was. I thought, ‘I’ll check it later.’”

She was shocked at what she found.

“Later, I downloaded it onto my computer and there was the image of a child in that picture,” she said. “You can see her eyes, her hair. You can make it out plain as day. I said, ‘oh, my God.’”

No one else was in the room when Luney took the picture that appears to be a little brunette girl peeking at her from over the foot of the bed.

“We tried to recreate it with actual people and you can’t recreate that,” she said. “It’s obviously a child. It’s just an awesome picture.”

While Luney downloaded the photograph, members of her team watching over her shoulder, the Academy again let them know it was aware of their presence.

“You could hear footsteps out in the hallway,” she said. “We’d look out the door and there’d be nobody there. When we went back in, we’d here little giggles like, ‘I made them get up.’”

But Luney wasn’t finished with the Bishop’s room. Her group went there later in the evening to try and capture Electronic Voice Phenomena (inaudible voices that can be captured on tape)– and they did.

“When we went back in the room later that night, (a group member) said, ‘I think we caught a picture of you,’” Luney said.

When they listened to the recording later, they found the voice of little girl saying, “they got a picture of us.”

Maybe the little girl liked the attention; at 3 a.m., Luney was awoken by odd occurrences in her room.

“We were laying in bed and the bathroom door was opening and shutting itself for no reason,” Luney said. “(I was) laying there and felt faint, feathery touches against the bottom of my feet. Then you would hear ‘shss, shss, shss.’ Like somebody was whispering to you, but nobody was there. “

The next morning, the owners said people have reported experiencing children running around their bed during the night. Luney said children died from influenza and cholera outbreaks and are buried on the Academy grounds.

But the most personal encounter Luney experienced was in the basement of the main building.

“My team was creeped out,” Luney said. “And if we feel creeped out, we don’t go in.”

So they left, but not without audio recorders running.

“When we were leaving the basement there was an EVP that said, ‘don’t go, Kim.’”

Luney is convinced the Academy is haunted.

“It’s a great place,” she said. “We went back a second time. There’s little strange things that have happened, but we have to have evidence. If we don’t, we throw it out, but the little girl was indisputable.”

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt c/o The Examiner, 410 S. Liberty, Independence, Mo. 64050, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Ouija Board Warned of Death

2009-07-28T09:51:00.006-05:00

The young couple sat across from each other as their hands joined on the planchette of a Ouija board. Tim Hess began using the board after his girlfriend moved into his Pennsylvania apartment, not realizing what it would invite.

“We had been doing this almost every evening for about a month and had been talking to an entity that claimed to be a man who died at about the same age I was,” he said. “He claimed to have died in an accident ... apparently he was working on this vehicle and it fell on him, crushing him.”

Although nothing bad had happened to Hess and his girlfriend while using the Ouija board, they were still cautious.

“We always used it together because we heard you should never use one alone,” he said.

But one night, when Hess sat in a bar up the hill from his apartment, his girlfriend, who wasn’t yet 21, broke the rule.

“As I was walking home one evening I found a bottle jack lying along side the road and decided to take it home because I work on cars a lot,” he said. “When I walked in the door with the jack in my hand my girlfriend’s face turned white as a ghost and she was screaming at me telling me I had to get rid of the jack.”

After she calmed down, she told him why.

“She had been using the Ouija board while I was out,” Hess said. “She told me she had been trying to talk to our friend but he wouldn’t say anything except ‘Tim’ and ‘No Jack’ over and over for about 15 minutes.”

Finally, after numerous requests, the board spelled out that Hess would find a jack walking home from a bar June 14. That night was June 14. But it’s what the entity then claimed that threw the girl into hysterics.

“(The entity said) I would use the jack and a car would fall on me killing me,” he said. “I told her not to worry because nothing was going to happen to me.”

She pleaded with him to get rid of the jack, but he refused; it was in good condition.

“I took the jack down to the basement and tried to forget what happened,” he said. “But every time I saw that jack I got a very uneasy feeling in my stomach.”

Exactly a month later, Hess’ brother-in-law asked if he’d help replace the clutch in his car – and he didn’t own a jack.

“I proceeded to tell him the story of how I got the jack and the warning my girlfriend received,” Hess said. “I told him that if he waited a few days I would help him but there was no way I was going to crawl under a car on the 14th.”

The men waited two days and, using a jack Hess’ brother-in-law bought, repaired the clutch.

“We fixed his car without incident,” Hess said. “I don’t know if this was because we waited or the fact that my brother-in-law purchased a jack for us to use.”

Hess has not touched a Ouija board since.

“This incident made me realize that there are truly other entities out there. Some may be good and some may be bad. I just got lucky enough to not get mixed up with a bad one. Something has always bothered me about what happened though. Do you think I would have even found the jack if we weren’t talking to our ‘friend?’”

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt c/o The Examiner, 410 S. Liberty, Independence, Mo. 64050, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

More Encounters With Shadow People

2009-07-22T08:44:00.001-05:00

For centuries, Shadow People – darker than night, human-shaped entities – have stalked the lives of people across the globe.

But they’re becoming more common. Are encounters with these two-dimensional, looming figures on the rise, or are more people willing to talk about their experiences because they know they’re not alone?

It knocked

TK first saw the Shadow Man standing in the doorway of his parents’ house.

“I was laying in my bed trying to fall asleep,” TK said. “Out of nowhere a big Shadow figure, about 6-foot, 6-inches tall, walked in.”

TK wondered about his sanity – but it was too real.

“The figure began to lean into the bed and stare at me, it would then lean back and look out the window,” TK said. “It went back and forth doing this for maybe a minute or two.”

Then fear draped TK.

“I wasn’t sure if it was an actual person or possibly a ghost,” he said. “From a spur-of-the-moment decision I leaned forward and kicked at the figure while kind of yelling. I kicked right through it.”

His parents ran into the room seconds later, and nothing was there.

“I was very creeped out but I pretty much convinced myself that my mind had played a trick on me,” he said. “I soon moved out … for college and never encountered anything like it again until I came back and stayed in the same room.”

At about 12:30 a.m., a knocking at his door roused him from sleep.

“I was sleeping on my side facing away from the door,” he said. “When I woke up to the sound, I turn around to look at the door and right next to my bed was the same Shadowy figure.”

TK is convinced it was the same entity he’d seen before.

“When I saw it, it completely scared the (crap) out of me,” he said. “I thought for sure it was a person. I am thankful to find so many people who experienced the same Shadow People as I did. I felt a little crazy.”

Red eyes in the night

Jayna was four the night her eight-year-old sister saw the Shadow Man.

“One night she was awake as our parents came up the stairs and she listened to their chatting and footsteps,” she said. “Then she listened and watched the light disappear as they entered their room and closed their door for the night.”

A few minutes later Jayna’s sister heard another set of footsteps walking up the stairs. But her parents were still in their room; she could hear them talking.

“After the footsteps, she said she saw a Shadow, and it had red eyes, standing in the hall and looking at her,” Jayna said.

But it wasn’t a normal shadow created by a difference between light and dark. It was something physical.

“She seemed more upset about the fact that it was more solid, off the wall, than about the red eyes,” Jayna said.

The red-eyed Shadow Man eventually walked away, but whatever it was, it never left Jayna’s sister.

“For the next 10 years it seems she believed something was ‘following’ her in some way or another,” Jayna said. “Strange, inexplicable things happened throughout those years. Some of those things were even witnessed by others around or near her although she said that she only saw that Shadow with red eyes that one time.”

The Hat Man

Tauni hasn’t seen the Hat Man since she was a child. But that was enough.

“My parents thought I was having nightmares and that I was seeing things triggered by television,” Tauni said. “But I know that I was very awake.”

Tauni was cuddled in bedding draped on the floor of the den watching her parents in the living room when something caught her attention.

“As I was trying to sleep, I suddenly heard the blinds from the window behind me hit the glass, back and forth,” she said. “I started to panic, and although I couldn’t look behind me, I could see the reflection of the window in the glass in front. In the reflection, I saw the blinds slowly lift, and behind the window there was a man with bright, glowing red eyes.”

Fear threatened to smother Tauni.

“I was terrified, but I had seen him before,” she said. “He was dark – completely black, like a shadow – wearing a fedora hat, in a trench coat of some sort, and had long hair falling around his face. He did not look human, but like deep darkness in human form, which accentuated his bright red eyes.”

Frozen, Tauni lie still, staring at this entity, when she found her voice.

“Finally, I was able to scream, and my parents ran into the room, trying to console me and tell me it was just a bad dream – my imagination,” she said. “I know that it was not my imagination, and I believe this entity does exist, although I am not sure exactly what it is.”

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt c/o The Examiner, 410 S. Liberty, Independence, Mo. 64050, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

The Haunted Parlor: Part 2

2009-07-16T08:19:00.000-05:00

Author’s note: This is the second of a two-part story on a haunted bed and breakfast.

Voices whisper in the night at The Parlor Bed and Breakfast in Ironton, Mo., and, when people turn to see who’s there – no one ever is.

Jeannette Schrum, co-owner of The Parlor since 2000, said disembodied voices speak to guests, a little boy playing in the main parlor smiles at those who see him, and a man wearing a white shirt stands in a window.

But the most common activity at The Parlor are shadows. Shadows of people often walk the porch of The Parlor, and sometimes wander the interior of the building.

“I see shadows all the time,” Schrum said. “The shadows are just unbelievable. They’re day and night both.”

Belinda Clark-Ache, founder of Haunted Missouri Paranormal Studies, has investigated The Parlor and knows the bed and breakfast is haunted. When her paranormal team stayed at The Parlor, members felt dramatic changes in temperature; taps on the shoulder and one man heard someone whisper his name – even though he was alone in the room.

“We were woken up at 5:30 a.m. hearing our names called in the hallway,” Clark-Ache said, going through the experiences of the evening. “Two different doors on the second floor hallway opened at the same time. There was the smell of fresh bread baking – she didn’t make us fresh bread that weekend.”

The most compelling evidence she saw was in a room called “The Brass Bed.”

Tim Harte MA, LCPC, University if Illinois-Springfield, was with Haunted Missouri Paranormal Studies that night, and had set up in The Brass Bed a computer system he developed with Dave Black, also of the university, that is designed to measure energy frequencies associated with haunt phenomena. Included was an infrared video camera with microphones.

“When he turned in for the night, he left the machine recording,” Clark-Ache said. “About 20 minutes later, you hear what sounds like him coming through the room. Then the bathroom light comes on. You hear bathwater and splashing. You hear draining and the bathroom light goes off. The rest of the recording is silent.”

No one took a bath in that room, or slept there during the investigation – and no one was visible on the video.

“Anyone going from the bedroom to the bathroom would have been discernable on the tape,” she said. “We could not reproduce the event. That’s got to be the most excited I’ve ever been about a piece of evidence and it wasn’t even mine.”

Although Schrum doesn’t embrace the ghosts of The Parlor, she doesn’t want to hide the fact that the home is haunted.

“I’ve had couples get up in the middle of the night and leave,” she said. “I put (the haunting) on the Web site because I didn’t want anyone to come in here and be frightened. That’s not fair. That’s not what they bargained for.”

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt c/o The Examiner, 410 S. Liberty, Independence, Mo. 64050, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” is here. Order online at: tsup.truman.edu, www.amazon.com, or visit Jason’s Web site at www.jasonoffutt.com.

The Haunted Parlor: Part 1

2009-07-07T22:10:00.002-05:00

Author’s note: This is the first of a two-part story on a haunted bed and breakfast.

The doorbells of The Parlor Bed and Breakfast in Ironton, Mo., ring at odd times. Jeannette Schrum, co-owner of the bed and breakfast since 2000, is used to it. It’s probably ghosts.

Flying curtains, falling clocks and strange shadows on the walls are common occurrences in the bed and breakfast that, for a short time in the 1960s, was a funeral parlor. But Schrum said there has been unexplained activity in the home much longer than that.

“The place had been haunted since the ’20s and ’30s, as far as we can trace back,” she said. “When we bought the place they told us it was haunted and I said ‘bull.’ I really don’t believe in that sort of thing.”

Schrum purchased the building with her husband, Robert Halket, mayor of Ironton, and her sister and brother-in-law, Dana and Moody Campbell

Architect Charles J. Tual built the home between 1901 and 1908 for he and his wife; the exterior constructed of concrete blocks made on site. A mortician purchased the home in 1960 and turned it into a funeral home. Although the building served in that capacity for only a short time, that time has a close connection to Schrum.

“My great grandfather was one of the few bodies that was laid out here when it was a funeral parlor,” she said. “And my grandmother worked here.”

And she may still be there. Although Schrum, who was raised not to believe in the paranormal, said the spirit of “a lady” – possibly her grandmother – follows her around the house.

“I have a woman friend,” she said. “It’s something you just know it’s there. It’s a woman and it’s always a warm, friendly feeling. My grandmother and sister and I were all very close. I’d like to think it’s her, but I’m a non-believer.”

Even to a non-believer, too many unexplainable events happen in the bed and breakfast. The new owners began renovating the home when they bought it in August of 2000 and immediately noticed something wasn’t right.

“When we first started working on it, things would disappear,” she said. “I kept it to myself because I knew the guys were going to make fun of me.”

By that time, Schrum had met her lady. Then her family began experiencing things, too. On a hot night, Schrum went to the porch to check on guests who sat talking in the evening breeze, when her sister called to her.

“She was standing with her back to the kitchen and pretty soon my sister’s at the door saying, ‘come here, come here,’” Schrum said. “She said, ‘did you walk up behind me a few minutes ago?’ I said, ‘she got you, she got you, she tagged you, she got you.”

Schrum could talk about it now; someone else had experienced her lady. Some time later, her husband received a more formal introduction.

“He was reared back in the recliner and had a pizza in one hand, a Diet Pepsi in the other,” Schrum said, “and he said, ‘oh my God. She just walked across there, stopped and looked at me and kept on walking.’”

The woman Halket saw wore a long, gray period dress, her hair pulled up in a bun on the back of her head.

“My husband hates it,” she said. “He just hates it.”

Next week: Paranormal research.

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt c/o The Examiner, 410 S. Liberty, Independence, Mo. 64050, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

You can find Jason’s books on the paranormal, "Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us," and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at www.amazon.com.

Black-Eyed Kids in Kansas

2009-06-28T20:57:00.000-05:00

It was warm for a December afternoon in Hutchinson, Kan., when Katie came home from work in 2008. Katie’s ride dropped her off across from her duplex, and as she stood in the street, her ride moving slowly away, she knew something wasn’t right.

“I noticed two boys standing in my driveway,” she said. “One had longer dark hair and the other had his hood up so I couldn't see him very well.”

The teenagers, about 15 or 16 years old, seemed to be watching her – Katie felt they were waiting for her. She steeled herself and walked nervously across the road toward her porch. The boys had lurked around her neighborhood for months, but they’d never been so bold as to stand this close to her home.

“I had seen them before, lingering in the yard, but they always left before I got out of my ride's car,” Katie said. “I had seen them late at night as well standing across the street when I would go outside to have an occasional late-night cigarette.”

But, although pangs of unease told her to run, their boldness angered her. She stopped and asked them why they were on her property.

“They told me they needed to use a phone and that the neighbors would not let them in,” she said. “That was when I noticed their eyes – they were coal black. Just black. No white and not even a hint of iris or pupil.”

Fear shot through her, but as evenly as she could, Katie told them she didn’t have a telephone. Katie walked up her porch steps and began to unlock her door when the boy in the hood spoke.

“He asked if they could come in for a glass of water,” she said. “I turned to look at them again thinking maybe my mind was playing tricks. But no, when I turned and looked into their eyes they were pitch black as the first time.”

These children with dead, black eyes had spoken softly to her, emotion and vocal inflection absent from their words. As she looked at these boys, whose long hair and hooded sweatshirts she felt hid more than skin, she knew she had to get away.

“I felt panicked and fearful but also very vulnerable and cold,” she said. “It was like I wanted to let them in but I knew there was evil present. I had felt uneasy before seeing their eyes but now it all came out.”

Then one boy said something that turned her fear into complete terror.

“The hooded one then told me they couldn't come in unless I told them it was OK and that they hoped I would because they were thirsty,” Katie said. “I opened my door and darted inside. At this point I shut the door and locked it.”

She dropped onto the couch, her breaths coming in short, heavy gasps, when something tapped on the window behind her head.

“One of the boys stood there staring through the glass,” Katie said. “I remember his words very clearly; ‘just let us in, miss. We aren't dangerous, we don't have anything to hurt you with.’ I was beyond frightened at this point.”

Katie jumped off the couch and ran through the duplex, checking doors and windows to make sure they were locked.

“I did wonder if they really couldn't come in unless invited but I didn't want to find out,” she said. “I sat in the living room silently waiting for a sign that they had gone.”

When her boyfriend came home a short time later, the black-eyed teens were still at the house.

“(He) asked if I knew who the two boys outside were and I said ‘no,’” Katie said. “He told me they had been standing in the driveway when he pulled up but walked away when he stepped out of the car.”

He didn’t notice the boys’ eyes, but “they gave him a strange feeling.”

Katie later asked her neighbors if the black-eyed children had asked to use their telephone like they had claimed. The neighbors noticed the teens standing in Katie’s driveway, but never spoke with them.

Although it’s been more than a year since Katie turned the black-eyed children from her door, she knows they’re still around.

“I still see them every now and then standing across the street watching,” she said. “But they have not approached again.”

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt c/o The Examiner, 410 S. Liberty, Independence, Mo. 64050, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” is here. Order online at: tsup.truman.edu, www.amazon.com, or visit Jason’s Web site at www.jasonoffutt.com.

A Ghost in the Building

2009-06-24T21:39:00.001-05:00

The old building on Siler Road on the south side of Santa Fe, N.M., sits in an industrial area. It’s housed a printer’s shop and a line of small businesses – it’s also home to something destructive.

Sally Blakemore rented a space in a newly built addition in the upper reaches of the building when she discovered something was wrong.

“I was a member of a large 10-person marimba band that plays 1,000-year-old Shona music from Zimbabwe at the time,” she said. “This music traditionally was channeled to the African people and they interpreted it through singing. It is used to contact the ancestors for ancestor worship rituals in Africa. We just play it for fun.”

The band members stored their instruments in Blakemore’s studio and, during a rehearsal one night, something let the band know it didn’t want them there.

“As we played, the water dispenser in the studio, which had just been filled, literally exploded off its stand,” Blakemore said. “It was the kind of dispenser where the plastic bottle fits upside down into the holder and a spigot for filling up your glass.”

As they played, the water bottle and a potted plant Blakemore had sat atop it, “literally threw themselves up and out of the metal container and smashed on the floor spewing water everywhere and smashing the plant to pieces,” she said.

Band members initially thought vibrations from their instruments may have caused the crash, but quickly dismissed it.

“It just didn’t make any physical sense because the weight of the water, to pull it up and out, could not have been achieved by vibrations in the water,” she said. “We were baffled and a little freaked out about it and ended rehearsal early.”

Blakemore, who designs pop-up books, was later working on project with her assistant when she realized something was definitely wrong with the building. They were sitting on the floor in front of a sofa when a thud pulled their attention away from their project.

A bar of handmade soap a friend had recently given Blakemore sat on the rug. She had earlier placed it on a table on the opposite side of the sofa.

“The soap had literally thrown itself up in the air, over the sofa and landed on the carpet where we were working,” she said. “We were astonished. How could this happen?”

She investigated the history of the building and found her incidents were not alone.

“An older Spanish man who had been a printer at the printing company for 20 years said, ‘One night, it was late, and I was printing a rush job for the next day. Something made me look up from what I was doing and I saw a face in the glass window cut in the door to the print room,’” she said.

The man stopped the press, grabbed a metal bar and ran down the hall to confront this person who wasn’t supposed to be in the building. He saw “‘two legs wearing blue jeans rush into the photo room,’” Blakemore said.

The figure appeared to be a 17-year-old boy. The man yelled after him and ran into the photo room. No one was there. It disturbed the man enough he left the building and described what happened to the owners the next day.

A story Blakemore uncovered may explain what the man saw.

“The building at one time had been some kind of youth detention center,” she said. “The story is that a boy had hung himself in the back room area where the printer was now working.”

Blakemore soon moved out of the building due to financial issues, but a year later moved back in to a studio on a lower floor of the building – the floor where the printer saw the teenaged boy.

“There was a definite creepiness in that hall,” she said.

Things were quiet when she first moved back to the building, but after a few months the destruction started again. Over a weekend, behind the locked studio door, something ripped apart a large framed mirror.

“The mirror, which was hung on a very large nail and frame support, had been literally torn apart as if someone had taken the edges of the frame and pulled them revealing four-inch nails that had been forced from the frame,” she said. “The wire still hung on the frame hanger and the pieces of frame were pulled out and all distorted around the dropped glass into a trapezoid, torn apart.”

The mirror itself was intact, laying in the floor “as if it was placed there,” Blakemore said. “My hair stood straight up in horror.”

During another rehearsal, a coo-coo clock threw itself off the wall and slammed into a door. The adults in the room only saw the clock; the children saw something different.

“Children who play in a children’s band … all looked toward the door of the room,” Blakemore said. “After we finished the song they asked who the guy was standing in the door.”

Since then, band members have started trying to appease whatever spirit haunts the building.

“The children thought we should make a place above a stair area as a spirit house for the uncomfortable spirit,” she said. “They placed a little basket up there with some candy in it and flowers and some paper offerings of blessings. Since that time we have not had an incident. The room seems calm now.”

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt c/o The Examiner, 410 S. Liberty, Independence, Mo. 64050, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” is here. Order online at: tsup.truman.edu, www.amazon.com, or visit Jason’s Web site at www.jasonoffutt.com.

The Haunted Conservatory

2009-06-16T13:19:00.000-05:00

Central Methodist University has anchored the small town of Fayette, Missouri, since its doors opened in September 1857. During the past 150-plus years, a number of people have died at the university – and some may still be there, awaiting graduation.

Ghostly stories, of knocks, taps, footsteps and apparitions are often associated with dormitories.

“Howard-Payne is where all the whacky stuff happens,” said Melanie Schaefer, a former financial assistance counselor at the university.

A stone outside the Howard-Payne dormitory reads “Howard Female College.” While the college refurbished the dormitory in the 1940s, a falling brick killed a student, reported the campus newspaper, The Talon. Since then, her spirit has appeared outside the dorm, but more typically is experienced inside the building, turning electrical appliances on and off, knocking on doors and rattling pipes.

But bigger things happen at the conservatory.

Sean Maples’ supernatural investigation group Missouri Paranormal visited the university and is convinced something haunts the building.

“We spend most of our time debunking things and I would say 90 percent of the stuff we run across we can explain,” he said. “But it was one of most interesting ones that we’ve done. We really had a lot of weird experiences.”

The building moaned.

“It was probably right around one in the morning. It was just me and one other investigator in the whole building,” he said. “We were probably two feet apart. It was so loud I was surprised the other team members outside the building didn’t hear it. It literally echoed through this church.”

The noise died as quickly as it filled the sanctuary and, Maples realized, it came from the side of the building that held the exits.

“We decided to go downstairs in complete darkness and out of the auditorium in complete darkness to get out of that building,” he said. “It spooked me a little bit. We went back in there and could not determine the cause of it.”

The heat was not on in the building, nor was the air conditioning. Maples’ group has been back twice and has not been able to explain the noise by natural means.

In the auditorium, Maples and other investigators have heard voices “like whispers.” Maples has captured a number of these on audio in the form of Electronic Voice Phenomenon (voices recorded in an empty room).

“One of the weirdest things we caught on EVPs was a cat,” Maples said. “There’s a cat meowing in the basement of the church. We looked all over and couldn’t find it. We really didn’t find that significant at all, until the second visit we captured an EVP of a man in the auditorium talking about a cat.”

That man may be former band director Tom Birch, who died in that room May 1, 1964, while conducting the piece “The Catacombs” from Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” at the annual spring concert.

Jim Steele, owner and publisher of The Fayette Advertiser and The Democrat-Leader, was a senior at the university and was in the auditorium when Birch had a heart attack.

“It was kind of a warm pleasant spring evening,” Steele said. “He had the white starched shirt, tails. (He had) Just as he had gotten into (The Catacombs) there was a ‘whoo,’ a gasp you could hear in the audience.”

Birch dropped onto the stage, fell into the drum set and died.

Since then, people occasionally report seeing a man in a tuxedo that looks like Dr. Birch standing in front of the auditorium smoking a cigar – such as the image a student saw in the 1970s.

“A girl was going from the student union across campus to Cross Memorial Clock Tower on the campus’ quadrangle,” said Robert Bray, Central’s Alumni Director at the time. “The apparition appeared and said, ‘Nice evening for a concert.’”

Frightened, the girl convinced her boyfriend to go with her to the conservatory. She found a picture of the man she’d seen – it was Dr. Birch.

“You can tell it’s a male in the church, the voices we captured,” Maples said.

Other spirits that reportedly haunt Central Methodist University are N. Louise Wright, dean of the conservatory of music who died much like Birch, during a performance; and the ghost of a young stable boy who was killed on the university grounds during the Civil War.

During the group’s last visit to the university, they captured an EVP that may have been the stable boy asking for help.

“Each one of us carried a two-way radio; they’re all on the same channel,” Maples said. “When (the child’s voice) happened, two of the people with radios were standing next to me and mine was the only one who went off – it was a kid.”

Missouri Paranormal approaches reported hauntings as skeptics, treating orbs and bumps in the night first as things that can be explained terrestrially. But they couldn’t explain the Central Methodist University hauntings.

“A lot of activity we captured didn’t really follow the normal expectations of a normal haunting,” he said. “It seemed like the activity was very sporadic. It was a hit-or-miss deal. If you weren’t in the right spot you didn’t experience it.”

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt c/o The Examiner, 410 S. Liberty, Independence, Mo. 64050, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” is here. Order online at: tsup.truman.edu, www.amazon.com, or visit Jason’s Web site at www.jasonoffutt.com.

The Evil Little Man

2009-06-07T12:32:00.000-05:00

The house sits on a large piece of land near the Tule River in California. Several outbuildings dot the property, but only one ever made Tammy quicken her pace as she walked by – the barn.

“About five years ago, my three kids and I lived in a house just off the river here in Porterville, Calif.,” Tammy said. “The lot we lived on was about 100 acres and there were five houses and one very old spooky barn.”

Tammy and her children had two dogs, a cat, two turkeys, six chickens and a couple of ducks, none of which would venture close to the barn. Some of the other animals weren’t as lucky.

“We had had a lot more chickens and ducks but they had started disappearing,” Tammy said. “I also noticed that none of the neighbor’s animals, or stray animals for that matter, would go anywhere near that barn. It was without a doubt just creepy.”

But the barn was on the way to the river, and they often had to walk past that building, its big doorway gaping and black as a pit.

“We always got the feeling of being watched,” Tammy said. “I am a bit sensitive to spirits and things like that anyway so all my nerves were jangling whenever I went past that barn.”

Often, when the sun began to set, Tammy and her children would notice their animals acting strangely, often staring at the old barn with trepidation.

“Many a night would pass that all the animals around us would be barking and howling and just going crazy,” she said. “I never saw anything and thought the dogs were just barking at each other.”

But one night she noticed not all the noises came from their animals. There was something else.

“Sometimes we would hear noises coming from the barn but always just figured it was rats or some other wild animal as we had all kinds,” Tammy said.

But then she saw the little man.

“One evening my son, who was seven years old at the time, and I had just come back from grocery shopping,” Tammy said. “We parked and got out of the car and as I was opening up the back to get the groceries out I noticed a movement out of the corner of my right eye.”

Tammy looked to her right but didn’t see anything. Then, as she lifted a grocery sack from the car, she saw the movement again.

“This time I heard a very freaky, very evil-sounding chuckle,” she said. “I looked in the direction of the sound and there standing about 50 yards from my son and I was what I can only describe as a gnome.”

The entity was about two to three feet tall. Baggy black pants hung from its waist and the “creature” wore a gold-colored shirt. It had a salt and pepper beard and hair that ran from beneath a red, pointed hat.

“That thing grinned at us and the creepy grin spread from ear to ear and its teeth were a gross brown and pointed or jagged,” she said. “It had a bulbous nose and large, deep-set eyes, though I really couldn’t tell the color of them. I never got a closer look at it and don’t know if it was wearing shoes or not because at that moment I dropped my groceries grabbed my son and ran for the house.”

Tammy reached the house, clutching her son close. Behind her the car trunk sat open, the groceries still inside, and a little, wicked man was laughing.

“We ran in the house where I promptly slammed the door shut,” she said. “I was trying to tell my daughters what had happened when we heard something moving in the garden under the living room window.”

As they looked toward the noise, the bent-over top of the thing’s red, pointed hat appeared in the window.

“I closed the blinds and moved away from the window,” she said. “The weird thing about seeing that hat under the window is that the window was about eight to 10 feet off the ground and that little creepy thing was only about two or three feet, so how was it able to be so close up to the window?”

Eventually, the thing left the window and Tammy retrieved the groceries from the car. She never saw the thing again, but until the day she moved, she knew it was still around.

“After that night whenever the dogs barked or howled we were pretty sure we knew what they were barking at,” she said. “We were also pretty sure of where our missing poultry had gone. From time to time we would hear a weird creepy chuckle and other noises coming from that old barn.”

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt c/o The Examiner, 410 S. Liberty, Independence, Mo. 64050, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” is here. Order online at: tsup.truman.edu, www.amazon.com, or visit Jason’s Web site at www.jasonoffutt.com.

A Demon in the House

2009-06-01T21:36:00.000-05:00

Author’s note: Carl Phillips is not the name of the counselor in this story. With respect for his professional privilege, it has been changed.

The modest Alabama home was typical for modern-day America; mom, stepdad, and three children – but soon after Carl Phillips stepped into the home, he knew something was seriously wrong.

“I am a licensed professional counselor that holds mental health counseling sessions in the homes of my clients,” Phillips said. “I was assigned to help a 16-year-old – whom had prior sexually molested his three-year-old sister – transition back into the family home.”

The sessions went well for about two months; then Phillips noticed something begin to chip away at the 16-year-old.

“The client began a very atypical downward spiral,” Phillips said. “I could not find a cause nor could I help him pull out of it.”

The teen soon molested his sister again and was taken from the home and placed back into a Department of Youth Services treatment center. But it wasn’t until the boy was gone that Phillips realized what tortured this family wasn’t the teenager, it was the house.

“I was asked to remain and hold four sessions with the remaining family members to help them cope with the 16-year-old's noted removal,” he said. The step-father, however, refused to take part. “During this time, the other brother, nine years of age, whom was very healthy mentally, moved into the bedroom that had been his 16-year-old brother's.”

And the downward spiral continued.

“While concluding a session with him, he asked me if I had ever heard voices,” Phillips said. “I was shocked by his question, which led to my questioning him about this comment, and he disclosed that he does not ‘hear voices,’ but instead hears a single voice originating from his closet.”

As Phillips listened to the boy’s description of the voice, the atmosphere in the room began to waver.

“Something in that room then changed, as if the air became slightly thinner and warmer,” he said. “I saw that the nine-year-old client also felt this change, as he had a look of terror.”

Phillips felt the urge to run, but something held him fast.

“I myself have faced many difficult situations in life, and I pride myself in never getting rattled,” he said. “But I felt complete, abject terror at this time to the point that if a child would not have been left behind, I would have fled the house.”

He didn’t, and the counseling session continued. The boy told Phillips of mornings when a deep, raspy voice roused him from sleep.

“He would be woken by the voice who would inform him that ‘no one loves you. It doesn't matter what you do, your family will not stay together,’” Phillips said. “He then began crying deeply, and disclosed that some nights the voice had woke him and told him go ‘and do (bad things) to your sister.’”

As these words spilled from the boy’s mouth, the tension in the room grew taut.

“I then instructed him to stand and pray as I prayed,” Phillips said. “Immediately upon beginning the prayer, the room again felt normal and the overpowering feeling of fear was gone. I discussed with the client about regular prayer and church attendance.”

A month later, Phillips’ required counseling sessions were over, and he never went back to that house. But the family wasn’t finished with him.

“A little over one year later, the family saw me out getting supper and came to speak to me,” he said. “I noticed the mom was with a different man than she had been with during the time she and her family had seen me as a counselor.”

The mother introduced Phillips to her new husband; then told Phillips what had happened after the counseling sessions ended.

“I got the coldest of chills when she disclosed the following to me,” he said. “Soon after I concluded sessions with them the prior year, her nine-year-old son had begged to change rooms. She explained that she and her ex-husband had been having very large problems in their marriage, and as a result, he moved out of their bedroom and into the one her youngest son had moved from.”

And it began again.

“The woman then looked at me and disclosed that she had divorced her ex-husband due to his decision to, early one morning, after midnight, molest her young daughter,” Phillips said. “I could not say anything for several minutes, and upon eventually wishing good-bye to the family, I reflected on their case, which was the most frightening matter I had ever experienced personally or professionally.”

Between the divorce and remarriage, the family moved from the house.

Copyright 2009 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt c/o The Examiner, 410 S. Liberty, Independence, Mo. 64050, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” is here. Order online at: tsup.truman.edu, www.amazon.com, or visit Jason’s Web site at www.jasonoffutt.com.