Real Ghost Stories for Midnight Walks

[00:00:06] Me and my brother looked back and I saw a bloody handprint smear down. Welcome to Tell Me A Ghost Story, the late night call-in podcast where we delve into the world of the supernatural and explore the eerie and unexplained.

[00:00:31] I'm your host, Michelle Newman. This podcast features true stories from our callers that will send shivers down your spine and leave you questioning the existence of the afterlife. So grab a cozy blanket, turn down the lights. Hi, my name is James. I'm from Greeley, Colorado, but my story happened in Loveland, Colorado.

[00:01:01] At the time, I was around six years old and I was living in a foster home. And my foster brother, he was on the swimming team at the time, so he had a lot of swimming meets. So, on this particular day, he had a swimming meet at Thompson Valley High School in Loveland.

[00:01:24] So, while they were all doing their swimming meet, me and my brother, who was also in the foster home, and a bunch of the other foster kids, and random kids we didn't even know, there was probably ten of us, and we all ventured off to the gym while they were doing the swimming meet. All the parents were cheering the athletes on. We, us as kids, ran off to the gym. So, when we got to the gym, we entered and all the lights were off. There was no one there.

[00:01:52] Things were clean. We all started running around. There was a two-story level to the Loveland Thompson Valley High School gym. There was the basketball court, which we entered on the bottom. Then there was the top part, which had like a bunch of folding chairs where everyone, and bleachers where everyone could sit and watch the games. But the bleachers were folded in and all the chairs were neatly folded, I remember.

[00:02:17] So, as we're running around, we all hear this big crash. And the chairs lifted up and shot at each other and crashed into each other and just fell instantly. And it made all of us kids, literally, we all bolted for the same door.

[00:02:42] So, as we go, I was, I'm waiting for my brother. My brother's watching where he goes. We go out. Me and my brother are the last one. The door's shut. And you know any gym, they have little tiny windows. Me and my brother looked back. And I saw a bloody handprint smeared down. But he says he just remembers only a handprint.

[00:03:09] And, yeah, we ran, got out of there, went and told all the parents. But I was six. My brother was nine at the time. The other kids were a little older, 11, 12. And we went and told the parents what happened. And they went into the gym. And they literally just thought we destroyed all the chairs and stuff. Thank you. James, thank you for your story.

[00:03:38] Sometimes adults just don't get it. Next message. Hello, this is Erica from San Diego, California. I have a story, but I don't know if it's so much a ghost story as it is a cryptid story. My grandparents are Chicano and claim to have Native American roots. So we were always told the stories of both cultures, Mexican as well as Native.

[00:04:08] I heard the La Llorona stories and the flesh pedestrian stories, as I like to refer to them now. I do not and try not to as often as possible speak of them or say their names because we were taught growing up that they do, in fact, draw negative attention. One time, my family, we were going through a really hard time in our lives. We were homeless and we were out of a house.

[00:04:37] Our neighbors invited us along to camp with them. There was a big annual family camping thing they did every year up in Palmar Mountains. So we went and I'm having such a great time. It was myself at like 17 and there were a handful of kids in my neighborhood all about the same age as me. We all went to school together, so it was so much fun.

[00:05:01] At one point, my dad offered to drive all of us teenagers up the mountains to the observatory. So we all agreed. We jumped in the minivan that my family brought along and up the mountain we went. My dad's always been a jokester, kind of one to pick and tease.

[00:05:25] He loved to tease my sister and I, the oldest two, because our grandmother had constantly told us those stories about flesh pedestrians and shakeshifters and how we don't say their names, we don't mention them. But that's my dad. My dad, he's a jokester. So we get up to the top and he starts talking about them and telling the other teenagers about them.

[00:05:49] And then he, you know, points out a deer and in the distance he says, you know, look at that deer. We're talking about shapeshifters. And suddenly this deer appears. How coincidental. And I didn't think much of it. I'm just irritated at this point that my dad doesn't stop talking about it.

[00:06:14] And then one of my friends picks up a rock and throws it at this deer in the distance. Of course, the deer ran away. They laughed it off and we left. Well, as we're getting ready to leave the observatory, the top of the mountain, we all get back in our van. I'm in the front seat. We start driving down the mountain. This was broad daylight in the middle of the day. Probably like two o'clock in the afternoon.

[00:06:44] Everything seems to be fine. And suddenly I start to hear a thump, thump, thump to my left. And I look over at my dad who's in the driver's seat. And he has this face of pure horror and terror. And he's just scared. And that's very weird for me. My dad's one of those tough guys who doesn't show feelings.

[00:07:09] So immediately I looked at him and I see him stomping on the car floor. And my teenage brain initially thought, is my dad doing a dance or something? Being goofy? But when I saw his face, I knew he wasn't being goofy. And I asked him, did the brakes go out? And he looks at me and shakes his head yet.

[00:07:32] And when I tell you that I have never had a more silent moment in my life than those two minutes that we were going down the mountain at 60 miles an hour with no brakes. My dad is an excellent driver. He's trying to put us into like a dirt bank and like a hill, like a dirt hill on the side of the mountain. And it didn't slow us down one bit.

[00:08:02] It actually almost flipped us over. But luckily we managed to get back on all four tires after that. But our car would not stop going. I really did think I was going to die. It felt like more than gravity was pulling us down that mountain.

[00:08:22] And then right towards the end, before the campground entrance, there was about 15 to 20 yards of guardrail. My dad, without thinking twice, pushed our minivan, my side of the minivan, into that guardrail. And we were going about 60 at this point. And it slowed us down to a complete stop.

[00:08:49] No joke about, I'd say, 10 feet before that guardrail ended. We were very close to the end. And at the end of that guardrail was a drop straight down the mountain. So it was terrifying. It was the most terrifying experience of my life. Of my friends' lives. We all know each other still.

[00:09:14] They still live in that same neighborhood that my grandmother lives in, that we used to live in before we lost our home on Mack Street. And we still talk about it to this day, how insane it was. We talk about how my dad was messing around about flesh pedestrians and saying their names. And I kept telling him, don't do that. Because Nana told us that when we talk about them, we draw their attention. But he just kept joking about it. And then that happened.

[00:09:41] Could it have been coincidence that we just so happened to lose brakes that day going down the mountain? Possibly. That's always a possibility. I personally don't think so. My parents, they swear up and down that they did their due diligence and making sure that the car was as good as it needed to be for us to live in it until we could find housing again.

[00:10:11] So they made sure to check that everything was in working order, both under the hood and inside the car. And that's one thing that they hold on to. They're constantly saying, like, no, we really don't think it was the car. So it's not a ghost story. I do have ghost stories, which I will call back with.

[00:10:34] But it is something that anytime I hear a story about a flesh pedestrian or a shapeshifter, I can't help but think about my own experience. So that's it.

[00:10:50] Thank you so much for offering this platform as a safe space for people like myself to feel a little less crazy about the paranormal and otherworldly experiences they have. Take care. Erica, thank you for your story. That is terrifying.

[00:11:22] Hi, my name is Vicki and I'm from Hammond, Indiana, and I have a ghost story. When I was nine years old, my older brother passed away. He drowned in Lake Michigan. I was the youngest of five at the time, and my four other siblings were much older than me. My mom and dad used to call me a bonus baby, but I was also kind of like a no shit baby because my mom had me when she was 43, and they already had four kids who were all at least 10 years older than me.

[00:11:51] This is my oldest brother who was actually 18 years older than me at the time. And throughout his 20s, he lived back at home with us. So at the time, he was living in the basement when he had passed away. He had a bedroom down there. I had always kind of felt like he was going to come back and say goodbye to me, and I can't really say why. There was just something that told me he was still kind of hanging around.

[00:12:15] I had this really interesting dream the night after he died that he came back and waved to me in the kitchen after everybody had come back there from his funeral. And it didn't feel like a dream. It felt very real and like he had come to say goodbye. So I guess I just always kind of felt like he was hanging around a little bit. Now, obviously, my brother and I were very far apart in age, and I was still a kid when he passed. But it always felt like there was a little bit of a bond between us.

[00:12:44] So the ghost story part comes in that I had come home from school one day, and I was definitely a latchkey kid of the early 90s, right? And I had that time that was from like 3 to 5 p.m. that neither of my parents were home yet. And we had at the time just gotten, I think, a cordless bone, which was a really big deal, right, back in the day. And I was going to maybe take a shower.

[00:13:11] I think I had come home from a practice of some sort or something active. I don't know. And I would always bring this little portable phone in the bathroom with me just so I had it. I don't know. It made me feel safe maybe when I was home alone. And I just got in the bathroom, and the phone starts ringing. But it was the phone that hung on our kitchen wall that wasn't quite a rotary phone anymore. But, you know, it was an older phone that made like a bring-bring, bring-bring, bring-bring. It kept ringing, and I ran out of the bathroom to answer it.

[00:13:41] And it was right by the kind of the back door. We had like this door that was half glass that we had a back porch, and then it went down to the basement, but it was all enclosed. Anyways, I answer the phone. Nobody's there, right? I hang it up. And I'm walking back to the bathroom, and I don't know if it hit me what happened first. If it hit me that it was weird that the kitchen phone rang, but the portable phone that I had in the bathroom didn't ring. But I'm walking back to the bathroom. I'm in this kind of back hall.

[00:14:11] And very clearly, as clear as day, I hear my brothers say, Vicky. And it sounded like he was right behind me. To this day, I regret. I didn't turn around, but I was so scared at the time, which is interesting because I did know that it was him. And so maybe there was nothing to be scared of, but I was still only nine years old. And I guess it was just a confirmation that I had felt like it was going to happen.

[00:14:39] But it was months later that this happened, after he passed. So I darted into the bathroom, slammed the door. I sit down with my back against the door, and I called my mom at work. I didn't tell my mom at the time what happened because I didn't know if she would believe me or want to hear it. And we didn't really talk about what happened at all, frankly. So I just called and told her I was home from school, and, you know, I just felt better hearing her voice.

[00:15:06] And I stayed in the bathroom until either I can't remember her or my dad came home from work, you know, an hour later or whatever after five o'clock. So I never turned around. It never happened again. And I sort of felt after that like he was gone. And I don't know why it didn't happen again or what the point was. It didn't really feel like closure because I didn't turn around and see him.

[00:15:32] But also what I noticed was when I got to the bathroom was that phone that I brought in there, that portable phone, right? It did not ring. So I felt very like I'd been drawn out of the bathroom. I'd been drawn to the phone in the kitchen, to the back door, down to his bedroom in the basement where he used to live. Like he was trying to get me out to say goodbye. So that's my ghost story. Thank you for calling in, Vicki from Indiana.

[00:16:02] And thank you for sharing about your brother. I think you did what any nine-year-old would do in that situation. And that's okay. Hi, Michelle. This is Sophie from Los Angeles. And this is my ghost story. So when I was younger, my mom was looking for a house for us to move into with my little brother.

[00:16:31] And she was going down the street and she was just drawn to this house. And we came in. And the first thing we did as kids is we ran to all the rooms except one room my brother would not go in. And we just, we thought, you know, because the house is old, maybe he just wasn't comfortable or whatever. So we just ignored it. We bought the house, moved in. And while we were here, my mom in that room put in like chairs, you know, furnished the room. And there was this little rocking chair that we had when we were a kid.

[00:17:01] And my brother would keep saying to my mom, Mama, the man smells. And my mom's like, what? What man are you talking about, little one? And he was just like, the man sitting in that chair smells. And my mom just thought, oh, he's a kid. It's, you know, it's imaginary friends. Because he would also say to us, there's a dog in the backyard. And we never saw the dog. So we just thought, oh, it's his imaginary friend.

[00:17:28] And then one day my mom was up in the morning and my brother said, there's a dog outside. And we looked outside and there was a coyote. And that's when we realized maybe it's not all just imagination. We did a little more research and we found out the guy who used to live in the house actually died in the room that my brother was too scared to go in. And that he would constantly say smells. This man, Sal, apparently would sit in this room and just hang out here.

[00:17:55] And so my brother as a kid would just be like, this guy smells all the time. And at that point on, we decided that maybe Sal is in the house with us at all times. Thank you, Sophie, for your story. But listeners, I had to know. What did Sal smell like? Like a very intense of B.O.'s smell. And you know what? It's funny.

[00:18:25] It stayed with him his whole life because to today, he is very much like worried about scents and making sure he always has deodorant on. So it stuck with him. Next message. My name is Brennan. This story comes from when I was living in Victoria, B.C., which is on the west coast of Canada. There is a house near to where we live in Victoria, which has a history, we'll say. Very strange history. Very unusual history.

[00:18:54] Very, to be honest with you, a sinister history. Not of what happened in the house in terms of people, but in terms of a presence that appears to be in the house, which seems to prey on people with that problem. The very first time I heard about the house, I drove past late at night with a friend of mine. We looked at the place, and instead of feeling chills like you usually do when you're telling ghost stories, I felt hot needles all around my neck.

[00:19:24] And that night both, even though my wife had gone to bed early, she had not had a chance to hear the story I would tell her. We both dreamed of there being an intruder in the apartment that night. And then I had some friends come to town. They wanted to see the place because I told them these stories. So I drove them past it in the middle of the day. It's a very boring suburban house. And when I showed my friends this house, they went, oh, that's boring, because it is. But again, that night, both of us dreamed of an intruder in the house.

[00:19:55] So that, I decided I'm not going to go near this place anymore. I just don't think it's a great place to hang out. But my wife's mother, who lives in England, she heard the stories, which came out at Christmas. She really wanted to see it. And I thought, oh, I'm being dramatic. I'll just, I'll go, I'll show her from the other end of the street. So I did. And again, it's a very boring little bundle. And she went, oh, well, it's boring. And we went home. And however, that night, it was two in the morning.

[00:20:25] My wife was in bed. Her mother was asleep in the spare room. And I was sitting on the couch looking at my phone. The lights were off. The only illumination was coming from the lights on the Christmas tree. And my wife had recently cut her hair short. So when the figure stepped out of the hallway and startled me looking at my phone, I assumed it was her because it was fuzzy on top. It wasn't. Now, this is where my memory splits into two, because I was awake. I was looking at my phone.

[00:20:54] And then I saw the figure step out. And the next thing I know, I'm lying flat on my back on the couch. And there was a shadow figure in the corner of the room staring at me. It is sort of tilting its upper body side to side as if it's trying to figure something out. And I can't move. So I focused everything I could on moving. And I finally, I screamed. I was able to move my arm. And then it was gone. I was awake.

[00:21:23] And I couldn't figure out when I'd gone to sleep. So I went to bed. And in the morning, I said to my wife, I'm really sorry if I scared you with the screaming last night. And she said, you didn't. You didn't scream. And my wife is a light sleeper. And then I lived in Montreal for about eight months in 2022 to 2023. And shortly after I got there, I was in extreme sort of mental and physical duress. I was in bad shape after the worst of the pandemic.

[00:21:53] And so I was just there to try and get well. And a friend of mine took me for a drive one night. And then they brought me back to my apartment. And my apartment was on the 28th floor in downtown. I would share in a room with a couple other folks. And so my room was very bright. The lights of the city filled up quite a bit. You know, even at night, it was quite bright. And I had a bad dream that night. I woke up.

[00:22:17] And when I opened my eyes, there standing over me was what looked like a shadow figure in a hooded robe. And I remember gasping. I gasped. And this thing, it didn't disappear. It sucked back into the closet like the end of Poltergeist. But that was so far the last time I've seen those things. Thank you for your story, Brennan.

[00:22:46] And if you want to hear more about his encounters with shadow people, check out the episode of Tell Me a Ghost Story called Accidental Exorcism. Next message. This is Cindy, one of your favorite fans. And I really like your toffees. And I want to tell you about the day my dad's ghostly greyhound dog named Sparky came back to say his final goodbye.

[00:23:16] He lived to be about 14 years old. And he was very close to the family. The first night, we were all downstairs in the basement doing our tours and everything. And we heard that familiar sound. Click, click, click. The sound of a dog's toenails walking across linoleum floor. It was always the same pattern, walking from the linoleum floor to the top of the stairs. And then they would cease.

[00:23:45] There was no barking. It was just as if dad would leave the door open, but they never seemed to go down the steps. It quit when we got a new dog and the dog felt jealous or something and didn't want to come back. I wonder if anybody else listening to this broadcast have had a ghostly experience from a former pet. Has your pet come back to visit you? Would you like to tell Michelle about it? I'm sure she'd love to hear your story.

[00:24:22] Cindy, thank you. I know. Where are all my ghost animal callers? I would love to hear more of those stories. Hi, my name is Jules and I am in Santa Barbara, California. And I have a ghost story for you. My first interaction with a ghost was all the way back in 2001.

[00:24:51] I was living in Seattle and I had a new boyfriend at the time and we were super young, super in love, super broke. And so we wanted to do like a weekend getaway. And because we didn't have a lot of money, the easiest thing to do would be to drive across the border to Canada and to go to this youth hostel that we had heard of. That was really cheap. This is before, you know, iPhones and Instagrams. We had heard there was this youth hostel there.

[00:25:22] It's like $20 a night. It's called the Canby. And the area was like very indie rock, very cool, artsy scenes. We were like great. And we went up, stayed at the Canby one night. It was definitely like creaky and old walls, not well kept up, super hip and cool. Had a great time and decided to stay a second night, booked a room for the second night. Went to bed that night.

[00:25:47] And then in the middle of the night, I had to use the restrooms and walk down this incredibly long hallway. We were like the furthest away from that restroom. Go to the restroom, wash my hands. I start, you know, walking back down this super long hallway to our room. And granted, we had probably been like stoned most of the day. But by no means was I like wasted or on anything other than like just, you know, I was a little bit tired.

[00:26:14] So it was like a little bit like groggy walking down the hallway. And as I'm walking down the hallway, I see just out of nowhere a man. And it's his side profile. And I clearly and it's been how many, you know, so many years. I clearly remember his. He had black pants on and I could see his side profile. So I could see he had like a coat with like the lapels. He had a top hat.

[00:26:44] And I think he has something in his hand, maybe like a small cane or something. And he was not quite solid, but he was not quite see through. It was like a mix. And of course, I'm kind of walking down thinking I'm just seeing a person walking across from me about 10 feet in front of me into a door. I'm thinking, oh, someone's I didn't think that the outfit was just strange. It was like, whatever.

[00:27:14] Walking into a door. And so when I got to that point of the hallway where the door would have been, you know, you kind of subconsciously when you walk past someone, they're going in their apartment building, you potentially hear them put down their keys, take their shoes off, put the lock on. So I was kind of like, I think, subconsciously like looking for a sound. That's a sign that someone had just gone through a door. And when I passed up into the hallway where there would be a door there, there was no door there.

[00:27:44] It was just a solid wall. So I had just seen someone walk through a wall. I didn't think much of it. I just kind of kept walking. I remember clearly unlocking the door to our room, shutting the door, sitting on the bed. And my eyes kind of like popped up. And I was like, told my boyfriend, I was like, I just saw a ghost. And he was just like, what? And I told him everything that happened.

[00:28:12] And then that kind of started like a whole other kind of like just different things that happened to me in the years to come when it came to like seeing ghosts or feeling them or seeing things move. Because I think after that is when I just kind of like became open to it. And then kind of fast forward many, many years. Now I was living in New York and it was 2008.

[00:28:42] And since that time, I've always kind of like sensed things moving in, you know, the room that I was in. Or a lot of times I felt like the go to for a ghost was like to turn on the bathroom light. I didn't know where I turned the TV on or the one that constantly kept happening to me in hotels and like apartments I live in is my sheets would get moved, like poked. Like I would kind of like be laying there, no one there.

[00:29:11] And I could see the sheets just like just poking a little bit. I don't know if ghosts like have the ability to move sheets. But anyway, so fast forward 2008. Now I'm in New York. I'm in a new apartment, an old apartment as always in New York. And I could definitely sense there was something in this apartment. But there was something like very different about this particular ghost. And it took me a long time to figure it out.

[00:29:40] And what I figured out was this being, this ghost, was very short. Because I could never sense them above my waist. They were always like low to the ground. And so I kind of made up in my mind that it was a child. I was like, because the thing about this ghost is it followed me around the apartment constantly. Almost like I could hear their footsteps.

[00:30:12] And what kind of like, you know, the mirrors in the bathroom would open. The TV would turn on all the time. It's like children's shows. And, you know, they would follow me around. And so I got kind of annoyed with this particular ghost. And for some reason, my mind always thought it was a girl. So I had to kind of make rules for the girl or the child. I was like, okay, you, I know that you're here. You're not leaving. You don't seem to be like dangerous. You're trying to do anything weird to me.

[00:30:41] But I need to set some boundaries. And you can't come into my room. Like you can't get into my room and you can't come to the bathroom with me. Like we're done. I need a lot of space. So I like officially laid down the groundwork. And that, you know, the thing about that I learned over time with ghosts is if you lay down really clear boundaries, most of the time they will like abide to them.

[00:31:07] You know, now that I'm like a mom, I can't imagine a child ever listening to you. So maybe the ghost is a dog. At the end of the day, I think what ended up happening is I kind of like for a while I had this like, oh, I have a superpower. I can like sense things and I can see things and I can. And it kind of started to annoy me. So I made a conscious decision like after that apartment experience in New York that I was going to stop being open to it.

[00:31:37] Stop trying to read the room. So basically with age, I just closed myself off because I was kind of tired of having the experiences. And really since then, I haven't had it needed because with the little girl at the Brooklyn apartment, just like, you know, because it was just constant need for attention. And I'm someone who just likes to be alone sometimes. So, you know, 2008 to now, I haven't really had anything since.

[00:32:07] But for a period of time, I felt like I was just something in me. I had an openness. Thank you, Jules, for sharing your story. It was also a great example of how to set boundaries with the living and the dead. That's all we have this week, folks. Do you have a ghost story? Call 701-484-2666.

[00:32:37] That's 701-484-2666. Or go to tellmeaghoststory.com and leave your story there. Thank you to all the callers who left messages this week. And as always, I'm your host, Michelle Newman, signing off. See you next week.

[00:33:07] Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.